It’s a sad story: the Niagara Falls Reporter was one of those urban weeklies that have been popping up all over the place in the last few decades. A good paper, apparently, with a lot of popularity…and then it was sold to a new publisher, a guy who dreamed of being Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, and it began to go downhill into teabaggery and censorship of the more liberal columnists. A movie reviewer, Michael Calleri, found his submitted reviews disappearing, strangely, so he asked why. The publisher wrote back and explained. It’s a long post with a long letter, but do not be daunted: it’s horrifying. The publisher did not like him reviewing movies with strong female characters.
I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.
where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.
i believe in manliness.
…
with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.
they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.
the male as lesser in courage strength and power than the female.
it may be ok for some but it is not my kind of manliness.
That’s just a short excerpt, and there’s much more. That guy really does not like women, except the meek and mild ones, and he hates movies that feature strong women so much that he doesn’t even want to know they exist.
He doesn’t even notice that in most movies, women “are just lesser versions or shadows of” men. I guess all we need to see in the future are more remakes of The Expendables (which so far I consider the very worst big budget movie of the decade.)
It also reflects something insidious. You can be a world-class idiot and regressive asshole and be filthy rich; there are economic niches, like, say, running a casino or a coal mine, where you can actually thrive with those characteristics, or even better, you can just inherit the wealth. And then what you can do is take over media and poison the intellectual environment.
The teabaggers know this. Christians know this. Look around you and you see it everywhere: there are so many lower level opportunities that can be snapped up and used to shape the culture: you don’t have to run for president or be rich enough to own Fox News. Run for school board, edit the local paper or entertainment weekly, charge into your regional political caucus and twist the agenda of your county. Conservatives are great at doing that, and if they don’t succeed in building something up, they’ll at least have destroyed a public school system or newspaper.
Look around your community. Stark raving lunatics can get positions of influence at the local level. And before you know it, conspiracy theorists and kooks are taking over your state, and instructing legislators on the finer points of madness:
Keep this in mind. We managed to get a conservative Democrat elected to the presidency. He’s going to be crippled because he has to work with a hierarchy of wingnuts.
We have those out here.
Their business model is compelling. They are free.
Lots of advertising. They aren’t news oriented, it’s more arts, entertainment, articles, and commentary.
Some of them are surprisingly good. They cover stories that the regular newspapers don’t pay much attention to, official corruption, etc..
They tried that in my area this election.
The Tea Party candidates didn’t do very well, 25-30% of the vote.
They were extremely vague on their plans. It always involves cutting taxes without cutting services, which is flat out impossible. Romney/Ryan did the exact same thing.
That sounds a good deal like Conservapedia’s Ken DeMeyer (User:Conservative) who accuses anybody he doesn’t like of “lacking machismo”. Perhaps not conicidentally, KenDoll (as he’s known at RationalWiki) lives in Buffalo, NY. He doesn’t sound like the type to actually publish a paper, however.
The same fucking mindset that argued that Nate Silver had to be wrong in his projection because the fool felt the Nate Silver speaks like R*sh L*mb**gh’s parody of a gay man.
(Keep in mind that homophobia and misogyny are linked.)
Ugh, I looked through the newspapers’ archives a bit. Add homophobia to the list of offenses.
I am shocked! Shocked I say!
Homophobia also!
Who could have guessed?
Children are indoctrinated by watching Snow White? The horror!
Obama has people killed on a weekly if not daily basis.
Obama’s Kill List is not pretend and the people he kills are women and children that have no defence.
Obama is Stalin and Mao with a smile.
Obama is a war criminal. Obama is one of them.
But American people don’t have to see that or can deny and disregard the deaths.
Seems Obama is crippled because he shows no concern about the deaths he causes.
To be fair, the reviewer did commit the outrageous crime of offering “critiques from an artistic standpoint”
The type of audience the publisher is going for can only accept critiques viewed through such time-tested lenses as bigotry, prejudice and self-loathing.
I’d suggest he and those with a similar viewpoint dispense with the idea of movie reviews entirely and rely on Fox News for their audio-visual entertainment. Leave that commie-pinko “art” stuff to the ladies and us presumably un-manly men permanently. We can appreciate the enormous increase in quality and they won’t have to see women or other unapproved groups doing interesting things and developing character.
Way to miss the fucking point, asshole.
Also, asshole, part of the reason why many of us do not like Obama is because of the drone attacks. That is not the fucking same as the mass starvation that both Stalin and Mao caused. You have missed the point in so many ways.
But you have a pet cause to hammer home, content and relevance be damned.
The only proper Snow White is a Terri Schiavo style Snow White who can only be saved by a manly man.
Janine,
Make sure there’s a couch somewhere nearby…
Ready?
They don’t seem to be especially fond of taxes either.
Has Joed ever said anything that wasn’t his pet hobby horse?
No. I can’t believe that. Right wing patriarchy rag — homophobic, misogynistic, morally righteous — and they don’t like taxes either?
[thud]
Somebody moved the fekkin’ couch!
Don’t think so. Even his rantings about the election (we need to vote for Mitt because Obama kills people with drones) was the same one note samba.
*quickly shows a cushion under Ogvorbis’ head*
I said “Make sure there’s a couch somewhere nearby”, but no, no one ever listens to me.
a3kr0n:
Ok, smarty-pants, you’ll change your tune when your daughter shacks up with seven guys!
Sorry. I know this computer has a function that allows it to read things to me but I don’t have it turned on. So you may have been saying it, but I didn’t hear it.
And how does showing a cushion under my head help?
Well, from a historical point of view, this is wrong. The famine in Ukraine was not caused by an ineffective economic policy (as the Great Leap Forward was). It was a deliberate plan to starve a rebellious population. In a sense, it’s worse. But of course, it weakens the luming together of Mao and Stalin.
Ogvorbis,
You fell -> hit head -> cushion
It’s not a very good joke, I admit.
Sorry.
Ah. Shoving a cushion under my head, not showing a cushion under my head.
All Hail Tpyos!
Oh, *facepalm*
I misspelled.
Mystery solved.
You have eyes in the back of your head, right?
And here my brain autocorrected to “shoves”. Never even caught it.
But hooray for no-caps idiot publishers with bad punctuation* (“cum eunuchs”, lol) and an 18th century popular view of zoology moralizing against movie reviews of movies with women in them.
*Disclaimer: I readily admit to playing fast and loose with punctuation myself.
No, that was me mom. And my Wife, for that matter.
POLICE STATE.
Because of the wimmins!
Wimmin protagonists are making men chop their balls off left and right while they wag like little doggies for the POLICE STATE.
Oh lordy lordy!
You said something?
And who would be the police in police state? Not the women?! *shock horror*
This makes me want a movie version of Jim Hines’s Princess novels all the more.
Summary of the first one: Cindarella’s husband gets kidnapped by her stepsisters several months after their happy ending wedding. Her mother-in-law, the Queen (and also castle spymaster), puts her two best agents on the case: Talia (aka Sleeping Beauty), a woman whose fairy-gifted grace is good for martial arts as well as dancing and Snow (White), who learned a few tricks from her mother the sorceress and totally took her magic mirror.
It’s a pretty awesome book, would make an awesome movie*, and knowing it would piss people like this guy off is icing on the cake.
* Granted, I’d bet they’d whitewash Talia, because how dare Sleeping Beauty be from Fantasy Middle East rather than Fantasy Europe.
Completely off-topic
When I was in high school, I used that word in a Scrabble game — the English teachers set it up and about 20 of us volunteered to play in a tournament. Immediately, the word ‘cum’ was challenged as being inappropriate. The teacher cam over. “Billy, do you know what that word means?”
“Of course I do. It means ‘with.'”
“No, no it doesn’t.” And she pulled out a dictionary and discovered that ‘cum’ really does mean ‘with.’ Which is really funny because she graduated cum laude from Frostburg State College with a bachelors in English and secondary education.
And she would have loved a newspaper like this. She thought that McCarthy had saved America by getting all the commies out of government and that God was going to abandon America because Jimmy Carter fulfilled the Panama Canal Treaty’s fine print.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It’s pathetic when men like this one can only find identity by creating a hierarchy and putting themselves on top of others. You are men on your own, by yourselves, goddammit.
Who teaches this alpha and beta bullshit? There’s no such thing in humans.
Don’t be a fool! America will be yet another in a long list of effeminate dictatorships run by wimmin tyrants! Just like…
Um…
W– Hold on, gimme a…
Hmm…
Beatrice @5:
People that think gay men aren’t “manly” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) need to venture into a gay club for bears. Or, even better, they can come to Atlanta and have a few drinks at WOOFS, a gay sports bar.
By the way, there’s a Spanish version of Snow White with no prince. Not even a beta. That must be like flat out murder to this guy.
Isn’t ‘cum eunuchs’ a contradiction in terms?
joed @8:
You’re comparing Obama to Stalin and Mao?
I wasn’t aware that the president had a kill list as extensive as those two butchers. I find your conclusion invalid and unsupported.
****
Ogvorbis:
There are actually morons out there that think Romney/Ryan wouldn’t have instituted policies that would negatively impact the quality of life of millions of Americans AND continued drone strikes? Seems to me R/R team would have offed more people than the Obama administration. That’s why I voted for the guy who would kill less people (and wasn’t trying to rob people of their human/civil rights).
What kind of man is that obsessed with “manliness”? Apart from Gen. Jack D. Ripper.
While my sympathy is, of course, with Calleri, he’s… kind of a rambling windbag, isn’t he?
Tony:
Yes. Joed, during the runup to the election, kept insisting that we should vote for Romney because Romney hasn’t killed anyone using the military.
His idea of how women should be portrayed in movies reminds me of a Futurama quote.
“Kif, stand in that hole so I look taller”
@15 Ogvorbis
I did not say, “vote for Romney”.
What I said was, If you must vote for a candidate that can win the election then you have already lost. The fix is in. You have options that are mandated by the elite. That’s what I said.
Never mind the fact that the MittBot 3000 would have recycled most of the wrecking crew that brought us the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. Joed is not smart enough to catch that detail.
The slagging continuing post election is really really annoying
This has been explained to you multiple times and you still refuse to even consider the possibility that voting for the lesser of two evils is voting for less evil.
But Ing, joed is here to point out that Obama is just like Stalin and Mao; just not in the way that the wingnuts imply.
@44
I am not able to vote for a person that kills women and children. I am not able to disregard murder.
And how many people would Obama have to kill in order to mingle with Stalin and Mao?
The “lesser of 2 evils” is a concept created by the elite in order for you to continue furthering the system. If you think about it you will agree.
That concept allows you to vote for a person that murders women and children. No thank you!
joed:
We had 2 choices in the election.
Neither were optimal.
One was worse than the other.
One would have brought *more* pain and suffering to millions.
One would have brought less.
Not voting means handing a vote to the one who would have brought *more* pain and suffering.
Remind us again how you’re so outraged over the pain and suffering of drone strikes. Clearly that’s *worse* than drone strikes PLUS regressive social policies PLUS fewer regulations on corporations, thus negatively affecting the health of millions and contributing to climate change (in a bad way). While you’re at it, I’m sure you’re going to start criticizing Romney as much as you do Obama.
But sure, I can totes see how Obama and Romney are the same.
:: rolls eyes, notes idiocy::
Just got an email. It says:
JOED, YOU’RE AN IDIOT
-God
(there was a p.s. in there about how NOT voting would lead to more people dying and if you’re concerned with minimizing the deaths of innocents, you should vote for the guy who would kill fewer people, but I don’t think joed would understand that)
No the lesser of 2 evils is a concept created by people who took a look at all their virtue ethicist friends refusing to lie to Nazis and letting Anne Frank get captured and called bullshit on that noise.
Ok I am just going to finally be the one to say it so we can all move on and dismiss any further ramblings form Joed here
Joed got an F- on the Kobayashi Maru
I was once an adventurer, like you, then I took a George W. Bush to the knee.
So to recap Joed thinks that if by odds a horse race has two horses with a clear chance of winning and all the others are standing the wrong way or too busy eating oats or humping to even race seriously then that means the race is fixed.
You know Joed, we all know you don’t LIKE the rules that were laid down and yes they are poorly conceived, but throwing a temper tantrum about how they’re not fair isn’t really realistic at all. I presume that for the next 4 years you will be trying to build a third party up to national standing via work in smaller elections and accumulation of clout and influence rather than just acting shocked and dumb founded in 4 more years when you find yourself in the same position?
I mean FFS I would have much rather a Hurricane NOT hit me, but I’m not going to refuse to do the back breaking labor of putting shit in the garage up on bricks because it’s not fair. Grow the fuck up
Since you aren’t an American, it wasn’t a problem. The problem is you tried to influence our votes with utter stupidity. And I don’t see any condemnation from you for the rocket attacks from the Gaza strip which are targeting women and children, not military forces. Your moral compass seems to not be swinging freely.
I still would not vote for either of them.
My morality wont let me vote for a person that murders people.
you may see it differently but you know what I am talking about.
Am I evil for not voting for either?
Am I evil for trying to do right.
And why do you guys get so upset about this?!
You guys think about it.
Damn! I am fucking convinced!
Yes. You are choosing the warm fuzzy feeling of not comprising personal principles over making a choice that can negate harm for others, including lessening murder.
That is evil. You are the Catholics choosing to let people die rather than do an abortion. 100% the same
Then don’t ever vote for anybody. Go hide in a basement with your tin-foil hat and feel self-righteous in your idealism. I’ll deal with reality, as there is no other choice.
boring derail is boring. let’s talk about how that dude thinks Snow White is some sort of feminist manifesto destroying men, instead
I kind of want to see that
I wouldn’t say “evil”. More like generally ineffectual and counter-productive due to absolutist morality.
At least trying to shift the Overton Window to the left is something. Better that than allow Romney/Ryan and Co. to run right over the poor, women, minorities, and the LGBT community while most likely killing far more people with drones than the Obama administration.
Jadehawk,
Is this new Snow White any good? She seems to have taken a rather different path than cooking for a bunch of men and then getting rescued by a prince. But I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t say for sure.
@Coleopteron
Are the Catholics evil for refusing abortions because that’s ending a life?
And for the love of ALL that is good and filled with sugary cream can we stop fapping about the goddamn drones! Wartimeslaughterhappymurder is just as bad when it’s from a projectile mortality inducing pellet or a incindinary device or remote drone. It’s not the fucking drone that’s the bad part here. Can we stop acting like it is. Obama’s policies kill people wi-STOP there enough, end line.
let me see if I can sift this load of refuse a little.
The small local papers are mostly advertizes, it is the add revenue that pays for news papers generally. To sell the adds they have to have a circulation when the circulation goes down so does the add revenue that is the spiral news papers are in currently. That is how Murdock did it along with purchasing the competition. So if the publisher with his editorial policies can increase the circulation he will make more money if not he will not make money.
I get in my mail a lot of papers that are just the big adds the adds for local small business are in a small local papers neither of the two are widely followed. There is between the big paper and the little local one some midsized ones that print different localized versions for smaller areas within the greater So Cal.
None of them are growing rapidly nor thriving but so far they are still publishing
It sounds like this guy is making himself into a vanity press with adds time will tell how well he does.
I thought to be a critic being somewhat pf a wind bag was required especially a movie critic a job quite different from a movie rater which would only require counting stars.
uncle frogy
As an aside note I had had an idea in HS for something called Snowwhite and the Seven Samurai
I’m starting to thinkt he overemphasis on drones is because of the possibility of robot rebellion. Either that, or ‘impersonal’ killing is wrong, but ‘personal’ killing is a-okay.
This fixation on manliness from wingnuts really strikes me as overcompensation.
They’re from a party that actively uses fear to convince people to abandon our country’s principles and get panicky about what the terrorists will do whenever someone displays backbone and draws a line.
They use every imperfection in their opponents to justify their own wanton hypocrisy.
When we ask for professionalism, fairness, and impartiality from the government, they childishly whine about “political correctness” and dismiss our criticism as being “offended,” as if violations of basic moral values were equivalent to a frivolous, harmless insult.
Whenever anyone is given a chance to stand independently (especially women) and make their own decisions about their life, they act like it somehow emasculates them.
They have a deep seated urge to control women instead of treating them like adults. They’re too weak, too immature, and too controlling to handle a balance of power or negotiate on equal terms. That’s why they want to go back to barbarian marriages where the woman is handicapped by her status as chattel and the man always has the advantage for being the man. Their perverse idea of marriage is based on creating weakness, not on creating strong bonds.
They label compassion, empathy, and charity as weaknesses and sins instead of values mature people strive for.
They have a warped perception of what manliness means. To them, it’s not about character or how one uses power. To them, it’s about having power and the desire to abuse it. To them, growing up is about gaining a height advantage and legal privileges, not about learning or self-discipline.
joed:
Perhaps because you see the world in black and white terms without any nuance.
I’m not saying murder is good.
I’m saying “I’D RATHER HAVE A GUY IN OFFICE WHO’S GOING TO KILL FEWER PEOPLE.”
You *have* to choose, if you care at all about morality.
Why?
Because the impact of a Romney/Ryan administration would likely be MORE death than Obama’s administration.
But you don’t care about that.
You’re here to JAQ off about how morally superior you are to everyone else, and I’m sick to death of it.
Shut the fuck up you little troll.
Janine @55:
What name shall we give this argument?
Ing, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
@Chas
Holy shit XD Did not remember that one
Yes, see below.
When it gets in the way of people who are trying to do right that might actually have some effect, yes, see below.
Because we honestly consider other people’s lives more important than our own egos.
Ok, joed, third time to ask (maybe you answered earlier, if so, please just recycle it here, if you could), you made some suggestions as to who to vote for.
What are they doing to stop the killing you so despise?
Not “what would they be doing”, but “what are they doing”.
Nothing, right?
You think about it.
Voting for someone you know cannot win is a tacit approval for the worst candidate who might win. You supported Mitt Romney. Still do, apparently. Even if you don’t want to vote for him, you support him. There’s just no way around that. The more people here that agreed with you, the larger chance Mitt would have been elected. That’s support, like it or not.
The manly men of Man Nation cannot allow this to happen.
Most of it is fun, but Stewart can’t act, which sort of ruins it (she’s basically still playing Bella Swan); also, given that they stuck with “Snow White is loved by everyone because she’s pretty and pure”, it’s not exactly feminist, this dude’s whining notwithstanding
Bella Swan And The Seven Dwarfs?
Would the dwarfs be sparkly?
Except you are NOT trying to do right. You are trying to do WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
And, despite having been told again and again and again exactly why it is wrong, you persisted in your blithering ignorance.
You are the very worst kind of pathetic hypocrite. The kind who blathers mindlessly about “right” without even coming close to comprehending what “right” even means. The kind who would rather look and sound shallowly good than DO what produces the most real good in the world. The kind who demonstrates by word and deed that you do not even care about learning what “right” actually means.
Yes, you are evil. You are the very worst kind of evil. The evil that pretends to be good. The evil that should know better but refuses to learn.
joed @ 54;
It is a sad truth, but the only realistic response to the current US electoral system is for the American electorate to hold their collective nose and pick the lesser of two evils. The alternative is to allow the Republicans to amass enough votes from their legions of loyal, brainwashed godbot drones to vote a Romney/Ryan ticket or some equally toxic combination into power, and once that happens you can guarantee that things will get really bad, really fast.
If you aspire to meaningful reform of the political culture of the US in the future, then you have to stop social and religious extremists – like pretty much everyone in the current Republican Party – from getting into power now and comprehensively gutting any chance of a better tommorow.
Improving the situation in the US political system is going to be a long haul, but if we don’t make the smart decisions that are required to mimimise the damage being caused by the current crop of woo-soaked, ultra-religious (and in some cases most likely corrupt) politicians by picking the least bad of the available options, then any chance for reform will be shot down before it gets off the launch pad.
The way I read events, the choice America was faced with on the 6th of this month was;
1) Four more years of Obama – with all the grubby compromises, broken promises and questionable foreign policy decisions that entails – which would hopefully buy time to acheive real reforms that will have a chance to bear fruit in the future, or at least avert what would surely be the catastrophe of a Republican administration.
2) A Romney presidency that will take every flaw of the Obama administration and magnify it to the nth degree, along with the certainty of greater warmongering (particularly with regard to Iran), incompetent economic policies that will take a serious crisis and make it orders of magnitude worse for all but the ultra rich, as well as massively retrograde social policies with regard to gay and trans* rights, immigration, racial equality and in particular the rights of women to be treated as people rather than disposeable incubators. Such an outcome should unconscionable to any progressive worth their salt
Given the realities of America’s de facto two party system, there simply is no viable third option. It is one or the other, and the only choice that makes any sense is the option that represnets the less bloodthirsty and irrational of the two.
Will Obama’s government do evil in the world? – Yes.
Will it kill innocent people? – Almost certainly.
Will it continue the trend of restricting freedom in the name of security? – Probably.
Would Romney do all of the above and much, much worse? – Definitely.
In joed the pathetic evil hypocrite’s world, it would appear that Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, George Washington, William Mackenzie King, and Jean Chretien would all be murdering bastards exactly the same as Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot, and no one should have voted for any of them.
Yes, joed is a pathetic evil hypocrite.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar @ 74;
Thankfully, I don’t think the contagion of sparkly mythical creatures has been able to cross contaminate across franchises.
Yet…
Am I Evil?
Er, sorry. I had to do this.
The ‘we’ in the above paragraph from my 76 should of course be a ‘you’, meaning ‘all you Americans’. Being a denizen of dear old Blighty, I don’t get to vote in your colonial elections.
Not that our politicians (or our political system, for that matter) are a whole lot better, you understand.
I am having not very found memories of Jack Straw and of dubya’s lap dog.
One need only take a look at the context of joed’s activity here in this thread to see his pathetic, evil, hypocrisy fully revealed. Just take a look at his first post, #8, and the posts that preceded it. What relevance did that post have, in any way at all, to the topic of the thread or to any of the previous comments?
None whatsoever.
So why even make such a post, at that time, in that context?
What reason could there be, other than to make another strutting ostentatious (and false) display of his own personal pious ethical purity?
Pure evil, sickening and pathetic.
Jadehawk,
Shame. I was hoping for a kickass Snow White.
Then Snow White needs to talk to the Kninja Knitters. Stealth kick-ass takes many forms…
Tony ∞ºQueer Duck Hivemind Minionº∞ @68
“What name shall we give this argument?”
Argumentum ad fantasium ?
From the link in the OP;
Someone clearly doesn’t understand what big words like ‘journalistic integrity’ mean. You can’t as a journalist simply pretend that something doesn’t exist because it offends you. Write an opinion piece criticising what you consider its flaws, if you must, but don’t simply censor any reporting on the topic.
What possible relevance does his policing of his children’s viewing habits have? He wouldn’t let his sons watch it, and so he takes it upon himself to be enough of a conceited, patronising arsehat to arbitrarily decide that his entire readership should not hear about it either.
Only somone with no understanding of feminist thought would ever depict any version of the story of Snow White as feminists propoganda, and since when is depicting female characters as more than merely empty ciphers, vapid damsels in distress, or misogynistic sex fantasies rendered on celluloid ‘creepy’?
Apparently, by this arsehole’s definition of ‘manliness’, I am distinctly lacking in that department due to my strange compulsion to view women as actual people and my equals in every regard.
Strangely enough, I am quite happy being a ‘lesser version or shadow’ of women, where the alternative is being the kind of disgustingly misogynist jerk Frank considers to be a ‘real man’.
Again with this curious idea that any movie he assumes (without bothering to actually watch) promotes strong female characters is somehow morally degenerate (since apparently any woman not chained to a sink or draped about the place semi-naked is some kind of dreadful threat to civilisation), and men who admire and respect capable women are automatically ‘creeps’. I would consider recognisning the humanity and equality of women to be poles part from the crass, dehumanising objectification that I would consider creepy behaviour (and that Frank most likely sees no problem with at all).
“I haven’t seen it, and know next to nothing about it, but I am sure it is morally repugnant” – Frank missed his vocation; he would doubtless do a fine line in impromptu public bonfires at libraries…
Because a film critic actually discussing the artistic merit of the film in question clearly isn’t doing their job. In Frank’s world, if there isn’t some pseudo-moralistic outrage and rabble rousing in there, then it just isn’t a proper review…
Because movies that reinforce rape culture and depict women as mindless chattels or ‘prizes’ to be won by Real Manly Men(TM) (without the creators ever concerning themselves with addressing little things like the wishes of the female charcacter – afterall, she just automatically pants after whichever gunslinger is left standing when the smoke clears) contribute wonderfully to the development of well adjusted young people in society…
He cannot even conceive of a situation where women are equal in society without the boot being transferred to the other foot. It appears that the only way Frank knows to relate to the opposite sex is through a power dynamic of dominion, and so he assumes that if men don’t have their boots on the necks of women, then the only alternative is for women to rule over men with an iron fist. What a sad, pathetic way to go through life.
And he is a delusional conspiracy theorist to boot – now why doesn’t that surprise me? It seems that Frank parted with reality on acrimonious terms some time ago.
Most of it is fun, but Stewart can’t act, which sort of ruins it (she’s basically still playing Bella Swan); also, given that they stuck with “Snow White is loved by everyone because she’s pretty and pure”, it’s not exactly feminist, this dude’s whining notwithstanding
I agree with most of this statement. Snow White and the Huntsman is standard-issue Hollywood fare; it is hardly a misandrist rad-fem masterpiece of evil. Most of the female and male characters are equally dimensionless. SPOILER ALERT: The only misandrist character is the Evil Queen, who is obsessed with revenging herself on kings because she has vaguely rendered but traumatic memories of men who invade villages and discard old, used wives for nubile young ones. However, she’s the antagonist. She’s the opposite of a paragon of strength, she’s characterized with almost no sympathy and she’s dramatically killed by the breathily beautiful teenage heroine in the end. I have no idea how all this comprises a rad-fem glorification of alpha women over beta men.
It takes more than a movie entirely made up of a series of fantasy-lite vignettes and a teenaged princess who breaks out of lifelong imprisonment only to mysteriously gain swordfighting skills the moment she dons armor to be justly accused of advocating for misandry. I think one could even argue that this movie’s message is not only not rad-fem but also one unfriendly to women: they ought to be “replaced” as they age, and a woman’s obsession with retaining her youth and beauty and therefore her “power” in society is unequivocally despicable.
I don’t feel strongly enough that last argument to defend it as irrefutable, though. Chiefly, I love revisions of fairy tales and I expected to like this movie, but I found myself falling asleep during it instead. I think it’s intended for the Twilight audience.
Janine: Hallucinating Liar @ 81;
You and I both – not exactly our finest hour as a nation. It is bad enough to be like Bush – and so fanatical enough to actually believe you are the red right hand of the sky fairy – but it is perhaps even worse to see how out of touch with reality Bush is, and how much of a dangerous warmonger he is becoming, and then cynically throw your lot in with him in a bid to secure political advancement.
I wonder how many dead Iraqi civilians Tony Blair thinks his lecture circuit and his various corporate directorships are worth?
I wonder if Jack Straw ever stays up at night worrying about how much he contributed to the erosion of freedom in the UK – with his collusion in extraordinary rendition and his suspension of Habeas Corpus with regard to certain terror suspects held without charge or trial for extended periods, among his many other assaults on civil liberties?
Nah, that would require that they actually have something approaching a conscience between them…
Gregory Greenwood @ 86
Well it should be obvious to anyone with one at least one functioning testicle that “manliness” is a zero-sum game. A man can only be strong and manly to the extent that teh wimmenz are weak and effeminate. Creative cooperation and support is just another name for the ball-crushing of teh menz.
…now why am I picturing this as a self-description of the new owner of this paper.
In my fantasies, Cheney, Bush, and Blair are all given life sentences as war criminals, and every day they are awoken by having buckets of fake blood tossed on them.
@Ing, #50:
Didn’t Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario in Star Trek II and the remake by reprogramming the computer so it allowed him to choose a third option where he could win, instead of plodding into the no-win situation like he was supposed to?
marcus @ 89;
I chuckled quite a bit reading that – it sums up Frank’s position to a tee.
Frankly, I think that the entire concept of ‘manliness’ has become so toxic now that it has comprehensively outlived its usefulness, mostly being used for no purpose other than to be defined in opposition to notionally ‘inferior’ femininity, and as a cudgel with which to beat those men who fail to perform their gender in a fashion that patriarchal dudebros find acceptable.
What matters is our shared humanity, not narrow socially mandated concepts of ‘proper’ gender roles. Hopefully, with suitable encouragement from persons of principle, society at large will eventually wake up to that fact
@joed (#46)
Did you vote for Bush II? If so, you did vote for a person that killed women and children.
How many inane comments will you have to torture us with before PZ finally tosses your troll-ass?
WIN.
Dear Gregory @ 93
“Frankly, I think that the entire concept of ‘manliness’ has become so toxic now that it has comprehensively outlived its usefulness, mostly being used for no purpose other than to be defined in opposition to notionally ‘inferior’ femininity, and as a cudgel with which to beat those men who fail to perform their gender in a fashion that patriarchal dudebros find acceptable.”
QFT.
I think that, at it’s best, the word was meant to espouse the values of courage, honor and integrity. Obviously, these are not gender specific virtues. To my mind the word “integrity” could stand for the essential attributes of all these qualities.
Which led to him being unprepared to face a REAL scenario like that resulting in his best friend dying.
In Star Trek II it was mentioned that Kirk had somehow beaten the unwinnable Kobayashi Maru scenario, but it didn’t actually happen in the movie or explain just how he won.
With regards to the Snow White & the Seven Samurai, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles actually made that joke several years before Pinky & The Brain did.
Snarf.
Actually it did. He cheated and hacked the system to change the perimeters of the test.
He was both punished for cheating and rewarded for out of box thinking as technically preparation ahead of time and changing the situation is a valid strategy…but it’s still a failure of the test’s intended purpose.
So he only likes Manly Men, doing manly things, amongst other men.
So I’m some kind of weak nonmanlymalewithnoballs because I like some movies with strong female characters. Right, gotcha.
(some chance he will fail in finding a “suitable” mate and thus fail to reproduce ? )
Joed:
if you feel you can’t vote because what you are advocating is throwing your vote away, then withdraw from the real world as we have it today and refuse to participate IN THE SYSTEM THAT CONTINUES TO MURDER that is your right and privilege. Many have done that before and many will in the future but why do you insist on telling everyone else they should do the same and that you are more right than they are? It will make no difference.
I chose to participate in the world as it is.
If you needed an example of the difference between what a drone can do and what a modern jet fighter/bomber can do look at the news in Gaza then tell me are drones worse or better?
Go back to your hermits cave and leave the struggle to others.
uncle frogy
Warlike societies tend to be the most misogynistic, don’t they?
In order to glorify the masculine, one must abuse the feminine!
Manly men show their manliness by abusing women.
Christ, what an asshole!
I think that Tom Holt wrote Snow White and the Seven Samurai.
Snow White And The Seven Samurai as done by furries.
Wow, I bet he would really love the Phantom of the Opera! The Musical that Masquerades As An Opera that Has A Weaker Female Lead Than Most Popular Eighteenth-Nineteenth Operas!
“By the way, there’s a Spanish version of Snow White with no prince. Not even a beta. That must be like flat out murder to this guy.”
I’d love to see a summary… What does happen?
Disgusted by No Lesser Of Two Evils guy. The epitome of morality based on personal taint rather than human happiness and unhappiness. If he really believes as he does he had better put his money where his mouth is and start building his third option.
“Warlike societies tend to be the most misogynistic, don’t they?
In order to glorify the masculine, one must abuse the feminine!
Manly men show their manliness by abusing women.”
I reject your framework, and preserve my masculinity. Also, I don’t think that abuse of women is really a particularly common way to show manliness, (although it is a very very common side effect) it’s more about 1. conforming to a particualar code of stoicism and 2. not being tainted with femenine symbols.
But it doesn’t do Jack-Jill-OR-the-pail-of-water shit for helping him feel superior.
You didn’t really think this was about anything else, did you?
THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*continues to drink to it*
Nevermind that in the Stalin example there was a massive multi-year drought. It’s a terrible example – it’s an example about something that Stalin wasn’t even tangentially connected with. They didn’t starve because anything he did: They starved because not crops could grow. It’s stupid and ignorant of the context of the world for the makings of a paper enemy. He did order the executions of his rivals in mass killings: But that wasn’t one of them.
Speaking of The Expendables, this guy is going to go completely head-explodey with the forthcoming sequel. To which I can only say: “Awesome.” :)
They forgot to mention he eliminated all scientific research in the fields of genetics and darwinism.
Wait… they didn’t mention atheism… so Stalin didn’t kill people because of atheism then! Heheh! So much for the argumentum ad Stalinem
Markita Lynda #105
Yes Indeedy.
“It also reflects something insidious. You can be a world-class idiot and regressive asshole and be filthy rich; there are economic niches, like, say, running a casino or a coal mine, where you can actually thrive with those characteristics…”
I’ve got really bad news for you. Those aren’t just economic niches that these idiots / regressive assholes exist. They are pretty much the norm. The smartest do not make it to the top, the aggressive assholes make it there. All the mergers that have occurred in the past 30+ years haven’t been the smart / nice corporations taking over…it has been the aggressive / cruel / borderline psychotic corporations.
Moggie@17,
Adrian Mitchell on Snow White in the popular press.
What’s wrong with the Incredibles?
@110 Crissa
Thank you Crissa for trying to set straight the propagandized ignorant people. We are all victims of propaganda/Tribalism. When we realize we are victims of the elite/govt. then we can begin the struggle to overcome our prejudices and the nonsense we learned. Just making the attempt to overcome is a most worthy undertaking.
And I mean that!
@102 unclefrogy
there were many third party people available to vote for. The former mayor of Salt Lake City would have made a fine POTUS(imho). Nader ran 2 or 3 times but was not allowed media time.
If you must vote for a candidate that can win the POTUS election then you have already lost.
The elite allow you options.
The system is all the way broken and the elite are most satisified with the way people react.
quote; “I reject your framework, and preserve my masculinity. Also, I don’t think that abuse of women is really a particularly common way to show manliness, (although it is a very very common side effect) it’s more about 1. conforming to a particualar code of stoicism and 2. not being tainted with femenine symbols.”
I was thinking of the yanomomo, a brutal warlike tribe in south america – where, from what I have read, actively abusing and raping women is considered to be a good thing.
And I also think that we are basically saying the same thing. It is just a matter of semantics. In most patriarchal/warlike societies, one way to enhance and glorify the overly masculine, fierce, warrior archetype is to denigrate the feminine.
ie “look, you manly warriors are not a bunch of sissy women!”
and yes, abusing, and raping women is the natural outcome of that belief system. But as with the case of the yanomomo, outright abuse is sometimes considered a GOOD thing.
joed @ 108;
Yes, you certainly could vote for these third party options, but unless you can coordinate the liberal left vote behind just one of those possible third party candidates, then all you succeed in doing is splitting the progressive vote, and thereby ensuring that the Republicans – who can guarantee that their base will vote for the GOP’s preferred candidate so long as he (or perhaps she) is sufficiently reactionary and bigoted and has strong enough hardcore xian credentials – will be able to amass the votes required to place one fundie rightwing administration after another into the White House. It may make the individual feel good about themselves in the short term, but in the long term it will serve to do little more than cement the grip of the already privileged on the levers of power.
If you vote for a candidate that has no credible chance of winning due to their inability to secure a large enough slice of the electorate, then all you are effectively doing is denying your vote to the less toxic and dangerous of those candidates that do have a credible chance of winning, and in so doing you are in effect supporting the Republican candidate, and so the worst poossible of the available options.
Yes, the system is broken, and that leaves you with only three possible options;
1) Vote for the lesser evil – take the ‘least bad’ option to limit the damage in the short to medium term, while working for greater political reform over the longer time frames that any such comprehensive reform will inevitably take. Not ideal, but at least it has some chance of improving the county’s lot in the future.
2) Vote for a third party candidate that you know has no chance of winning the election, spoil your ballot, or engage in some other ‘protest vote’ behaviour. The outcome will be that your vote will not go to the lesser of the two evils with regard to the candidates that can win, thus effectively supporting the greater evil represented by the Republican/Tea Party fanatics and all their many and varied heinous social and foreign policies. Once they are in power, they will enact further voter suppression laws such as the recent failed attempt to demand that voters produce ID at voting booths, all calculated to make it easier for their base to vote and harder for that of the Democrats and other progressives. Not only will your protest vote be ineffectual, it will have the long term effect of enhacing the stranglehold of the religious right on power and the routes to power. Such a vote is an action that is not merely ineffectual but actively counter productive to the aims of the people who engage in it.
3) Repudiate the political system entirely, and try to affect change outside the political arena. Most such attempts can be easily ignored as the babbling of the lunatic fringe, and so are pointless. Only those forms that are too disruptive to be brushed under the carpet get any attention at all. Such action usually takes the form of violent revolution and civil war. Not only is such a course going to be very costly in lives, but in the context of the modern US system it has a near zero chance of success. So both bloody and pointless.
While option two is better than option three because it is less likely to end in violence,the fact is that neither has the chance of acheiving real change that option one has. Indeed, options two and three seem to be less about seeking a means to practically improve the sotuation, and more about the ego of the person making the protest – in the case of option three, someone who has immature and socially and historically illiterate fantasies of being the grand, Che Guevara/Robin Hood-esque revolutionary/freedom fighter, and in the case of option two someone who cares more about feeling superior because they see themselves as too ‘pure’ to make the tactical votes necessary to create the conditions where real reform will be possible.
I think you need to take a long, hard look at your motivation behind refusing to do the only thing that has a chance of creating the right conditions for future reform. Is this really about high principle, or merely your desire to claim some illusory moral high ground above the political fray, and thus bask in a false sense of your own moral superiority?
Like I said if you want to through your vote away on a candidate that has zero chance of winning because you can’t vote for any of the candidates that do have a chance and you profoundly disagree with them do that. If you can’t vote for any major candidate because the system of the elites have it so controlled that it makes no difference then make your little protest the elites count on it.
It will make no difference at all few will pay any attention at all to you or your fringe candidates. Nothing will change. You would just as well go live in a monks hermit cave and meditate for all the good you will do at least you will be doing no evil.
Or you could get involved and join the struggle as it is and work for a better world but remember you will never “fix it once and for all” you will fail as often as you succeed it is a constant struggle, you are just one of many. Politics as has been said is the art of the possible it is full of compromise and accommodation and deals . Rigid political “beliefs” and parties are religion in practice, Controlling, domineering, dictatorial and prone to massive failures.
uncle frogy
joed:
Shut up you sanctimonious moral absolutist.
We all know you’re not opposed to murder.
How can you continue to maintain this belief when you’ve been corrected over and over again? Your dogmatic adherence to this simplistic black and white view of the world is WRONG. You continue to hold to this, in the face of all the evidence that runs contrary to your opinion. Remember the site you’re at–> FreeThoughtBlogs?
You’re not doing freethought right.
But then in your world it’s not better to choose the candidate that will kill fewer people. You just don’t like Obama, even though he’s not your president and you can’t vote (which is a good thing, as you’d have contributed to a Romney/Ryan win).
grayhame @116:
Nooooooooo.
I don’t want my enjoyment of that movie spoiled.
Please don’t let there be something wrong with The Incredibles.
unclefroggy @121:
joed cannot vote in US elections anyway, so it’s a moot point. He’s being smug and self righteous while simultaneously not understanding the system in the United States. He’d rather (in his child-like simplistic world) tell people not vote and deny the candidate that kills fewer people the chance to win the presidency. Thankfully President Obama won, so that fewer people will be killed and/or robbed of their basic human rights.
as a newbie here, joed sounds like an idiot
just sayin’
Yeah, he has definitely fallen for the fallacy that if person A running for office is bad in their opinion, the other candidate must perforce be better. So untrue with the recent election. Joed also falls for the fallacy that voting third party polling below 1% gives the ideal results as it makes him feel good. Those who understand Real Politics™ know that sometimes one must vote using a bigger picture, and hold our noses while doing so. Which gives better results than the alternative.
“You have options that are mandated by the elite” is not news.
Hey joed have you seen this? You can introduce yourself there if you want, talk about puppies, Bo, whatevs.
grayhame @116 and Tony @123
Relax, you two. PZ was talking about the Expendables, the big action fest starring manly movie stars from the 80s. I have no idea where you got the Incredibles from.
On the main subject, that editor sounds terribly pathetic.
joed the terminally ignorant:
fuckwit. by the time there was a final vote available for POTUS, it MADE NO DIFFERENCE.
you want to make a difference? You either have to work at the primary level, within the current system, or else go create your own third party and then push for a parliamentary style system so it can share in power.
you are a complete and utter fucking idiot to think, STILL, that your whinges about voting for a 3rd party for POTUS in the last election made any sense at all.
you.
are.
an.
idiot.
now run the fuck along and play on the freeway like a good idiot, or hell, do something actually useful like I mentioned above.
I don’t know how I got Incredibles and Expendables mixed up! I just got contact lenses, and that’s the excuse I’m sticking with. The only worse than the Expendables was Expendables 2. Really, really bad…
Citation? That seems to be a minority opinion. Certainly, if this was a famine with purely natural causes, that would be pretty remarkable in itself.
No there WEREN’T. Not if one actually cares about one’s vote making a USEFUL MORAL DIFFERENCE in the world.
And a third party candidate who knows he or she has no chance of winning is free to say absolutely anything to pander to my vote, knowing that he or she will never actually ever be in a position to actually have to fulfil such promises in the real world, or be called out on failing to do so.
For this reason alone, I cannot ethically vote for a third party candidate that has no chance of winning. Their words, being unbounded and unconstrained by the reality of actually having the potential to govern, cannot be trusted.
It’s even worse than that for joed the pathetic hyprocite. joed has LOUDLY proclaimed that the drone strike program and the deaths they cause is THE PRIMARY, if not THE ONLY, criteria upon which he is making his moral judgments.
When faced with a binary choice of trying to convince others (since the hypocrite himself could not, actually, vote) to either vote for a candidate who will most likely keep the number of deaths caused by drone program the same, or gradually REDUCE THEM over time, or to argue for a course of action (not voting for anyone or a third party) that would INCREASE the likelihood of a candidate winning who would most likely INCREASE the number of deaths caused by the drone program and AUGMENT IT with other causes of death.
If joed REALLY was a moral, ethical, human individual who REALLY cared about the deaths caused by the drone program, his course of action should have been OBVIOUS, and he would not have had to hold his nose at all. He should have been loudly and enthusiastically endorsing Obama.
But instead he did the opposite.
It is from this that we can be certain that joed is a hypocrite and a liar. He does not, actually, care anything at all about innocent people dying in drone strikes. He does not, actually, care anything at all about ending the drone strikes or reducing the harm they cause. All he cares about is looking good in a forum of progressives, and feeling superior.
joed is an evil, evil individual, with no morals and no ethics.
QFMFT
. All he cares about is looking good in a forum of progressives, and feeling superior.
and yet, he certainly doesn’t look good, does he?
which leaves only the last:
he does this so he himself can try to feel superior.
that’s it.
If joed was actually a good, moral, human, ethical individual, and if joed REALLY cared about the drone strikes and the deaths they cause, then joed would be, right now, arguing for and advocating for progressive-mided people in the United States to become active in the grassroots level of the Democratic Party, to lobby the Obama administration to end the drone strike program (which the Obama administration would be far more likely to be receptive to than any Romney administration, another reason why people who REALLY cared about the drone strike program and the harm it causes would have been enthusiastically advocating for votes for Obama).
But of course, joed the lying hypocrite does no such thing. Instead it continues to blither on about how “evil” Obama is and how he, the upstanding moral paragon that he is, would not vote for Obama, like, evah (never mind how ridiculous, pathetic and irrelevant such a statement is now, after Obama already won re-election and will never run for election again). Or goes off on tangents about third party candidates that we already know could not win more than one freaking percent of the popular vote.
This is yet another way we know that joed is an evil, immoral, unethical, inhumane liar and hypocrite, who does not actually care one whit about people being killed by drone strikes.
(Those of us who would have “held our noses” while voting for Obama would have been those who found Obama’s belated support for same-sex marriage tepid, but voted from him because Romney is a homophobic bigot who once led a mob to physically assault a young man simply because he wore his hair long. Or those of us who care about the separation of church and state who wanted to avoid the potential step towards theocracy that a Romney win would have entailed, despite our disapproval of Obama’s placid kowtowing to religious norms and the use of religious language in public political speech. Or those of us who disapproved of Obama’s continuation and expansion of the various limitations on personal freedoms initiated by the Bush administration, in the name of greater security, but knew that a Romney administration would go even further, even faster.
But those of us who truly and honestly cared about the drone strike program and other forms of foreign adventurism and aggression and who truly and honestly desired to see the deaths and harm caused by these actions reduced in the real world, and considered an issue of paramount if not singular importance would not be among those voting for Obama with “our noses held”. They would be among those voting for Obama with great enthusiasm, and cheering his victory.)
You know…I understand where Joe D is coming from, I really do. But reality just doesn’t work that way. We can’t jump the Grand Canyon; we need to build a bridge, and yes, defend every foot of timber and rope fiercely along the way.
Wasn’t it Emily Dickinson who said “truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind?”
well PZ your link at the bottom to my local wingnut has an update
he is out
http://neighbornewspapers.com/view/full_story/20893643/article-Rogers-to-step-down-as-Majority-Leader?instance=all
Back on the original subject, even if it has been almost a week: this incident was on the front page of the print edition of the Toronto Star today. (Bottom corner of the front page, but still the front page.)
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/1291884–niagara-falls-film-critic-battles-with-publisher-over-movies-with-strong-women
One interesting thing mentioned in the newspaper that wasn’t mentioned here is that Parlato, the publisher that cut the reviews here, also made news back in July for his bashing of the ‘You Can Play’ campaign, which was a campaign set up by Patrick Burke (son of the General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs) to counter homophobia in sports, in honour of his late brother Brendan. Apparently, Parlato was upset that the NHL was ‘endorsing’ homosexuality.
Of course, as a number of people have mentioned in the past, when you get right down to it, misogyny and homophobia generally come from the same place…