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Go woke, go broke

HansMustermann said:
After some time navel gazing, and gathering my thoughts on the subject, here's what I came up with (and feel to disagree). And it's not any different that what I've been saying all along, but here it is in a condensed form for the idiot barking twitter puppies:

I'm not anti-woke, per se. I wish more people were actually more for social justice. All people are equal and should have relatively equal chances, in as much as possible.

What pisses me off is people just virtue signalling, or trying to cause an internet crap-storm for free publicity, while being anything BUT about social justice.

And that's my real issue with Hollywood these days. You can't really tell me that Amazon is "woke" or for "social justice" in any meaningful sense, just because they made a movie about female elves and black elves, while their actual human employees have to pee in a bottle, or at least one depot resulted in casualties because they weren't allowed to leave early before a hurricane hit. Or you can't tell me that Hollywood these days as a whole is "woke" or for "social justice", because they cast some talentless chick in a lead role, while during the writer strike the executives were giving interviews to the effect of, "eh, let them strike... when they can no longer afford food or to pay their mortgage, they'll come back to work."

That's just not telling me that they actually care about actual people.

Sorry, I don't actually give as much of a flip about 'black elves matter' as about actual people.
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I am with you most of the way, I think: Companies usually aren't 'woke', but if it sells, their marketing departments will encourage 'wokifying' their image. What you call virtue-signalling.
In the case of media consumption, it's nice to see a diversification of characters in Tolkien adaptations, but it obviously doesn't make up for the exploitation of the employees or the rest of the population. Big Oil went 'woke' in their advertising and self-portrayal decades ago.

It's still nice to see more than one race or ethnicity in Hollywood movies and TV series, though. Whoopie Goldberg has talked about the impact it had on her as a child to see Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek:

The (very short) documentary A Girl Like Me also makes me think that it might make a difference:

But it is unlikely to have much of an impact on the everyday racism that people are exposed to.

I disagree with your idea that, "All people are equal and should have relatively equal chances, in as much as possible."
1) All people aren't equal, far from it, and treating them as if they were perpetuates systemic inequality: "The law, in its majestic equality (!), forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
2) Equal chances is an ideal taken from the world of competition. Your success in life is supposed to be all up to you, but it never is and it never can be. The idea perpetuates the ideology of societies based on competition where people's success is supposed to depend on the competitive skills of competing individuals pursuing their happiness against everybody else, as if the whole system weren't already rigged to benefit one class against another.

Speaking of which: income inequality!
In general, women are paid less for doing the same job as men, and there are racial disparities as well. However, this difference amounts to almost nothing in comparison to the income inequality between CEOs and ordinary workers of both sexes and all ethnicities. The wages of CEOs are absurd. in the latest edition of Last Week Tonight: [/I]McKinsey,[/I] John Oliver points out who helped establish this grotesque and fairly recent inequality:

That's the point that even wokists need to become woke about. I don't see any kids' TV shows taking a stand against this inequality, against class society. It never gets beyond a Dickensian distinction between good CEOs and bad CEOs, the former always being on the side of the other good guys, somehow.
 
Well, yes, equality is an ideal. But we can at least strive towards it. You know, people getting more equal access to education, healthcare, employment, etc. That's what I meant by equal chances.

I have no problem with the idea of it being a competition of sorts, and some do better than others, but if it's as rigged from the start as the race from the The Dictator movie, yeah, it's kinda meaningless. And I don't think it benefits us a species or society to exclude some potentially talented people just because they were born in the 'wrong' family.


As for CEO's and the like, yeah, I'm with you all the way. Especially when it doesn't even seem to correlate with any performance. Like, I can easily think of people who got paid many millions to just drive a company into the ground. I didn't think of that as a 'woke' issue, or at least my best attempts at figuring out what 'woke' means, but yeah, thumbs up either way.
 
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dirtywick said:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/sports/ufcs-dana-white-bud-light-partnership-not-determined-money

well now what happens
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TBH, I find it a really strange interview, the way he tries to distance himself from money. I mean, sure, organizations choose partners for more reasons than the number written on the check (e.g., for image reasons). But those too are ultimately driven by what win or loss you expect to make out of that down the line. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the money motive per se. Capitalism works.
 
HansMustermann said:
TBH, I find it a really strange interview, the way he tries to distance himself from money. I mean, sure, organizations choose partners for more reasons than the number written on the check (e.g., for image reasons). But those too are ultimately driven by what win or loss you expect to make out of that down the line. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the money motive per se. Capitalism works.
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well if you know a bit about dana white, he's a huge scumbag and it was definitely the money. but it is funny to see him go on hannity, the place where they all learned how much they hate bud light now, to explain why bud light is actually really cool now and it's not even the money but just how cool bud light is why it's ok for him to do business with them again to a crowd of people who still take kid rock seriously.

it's really good stuff
 
They all brought their wives to the meeting to slap around. It was a real bonding experience.

I still can't wrap my head around being emotional over Bud Light. What nadir does your life have to hit for that to happen?
 
AB is announcing a billion-dollar stock buyback. I know nothing about finance, but it's being reported as more fallout from the Dylan Avery thing - i.e. more "going broke" rather than "cashing in".
 
theprestige said:
AB is announcing a billion-dollar stock buyback. I know nothing about finance, but it's being reported as more fallout from the Dylan Avery thing - i.e. more "going broke" rather than "cashing in".
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Its more advantageous to do a buyback when your share price is low. I know that much.

BUD trades on the NYSE as an ADR (American Depositary Receipts). So, its likely the European side of the business is possibly trying to take the US side private?

ETA: or they think the USD is likely to devalue against the Euro?
 
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theprestige said:
AB is announcing a billion-dollar stock buyback. I know nothing about finance, but it's being reported as more fallout from the Dylan Avery thing - i.e. more "going broke" rather than "cashing in".
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reported by whom?
 
theprestige said:
AB is announcing a billion-dollar stock buyback. I know nothing about finance, but it's being reported as more fallout from the Dylan Avery thing - i.e. more "going broke" rather than "cashing in".
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Stock buybacks help investors by reducing the outstanding number of shares. They also send a signal to the market that the board believes the stock is undervalued. Some see them as a sugar high for a stock price while others see them as a good choice for excess cash if no other investments are on the table.

A bit like a backhanded dividend, if you prefer analogies.
 
well, we now have many cases of actual Cancel Culture, with many people getting fired for trying to articulate a moderate response to the violence perpetrated by both sides in the Israel/Hamas conflict.

No protests by right-wingers as far as I can tell.
 
I've never heard of that filed under "woke", though. But I guess the term was never precisely defined.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
well, we now have many cases of actual Cancel Culture, with many people getting fired for trying to articulate a moderate response to the violence perpetrated by both sides in the Israel/Hamas conflict.

No protests by right-wingers as far as I can tell.
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i kind of get where they were coming from at the beginning, and i think it is a pretty good point that everyone knew: we should try and get it right. and they were right, 5 years ago that guy lost his part time job at big lots for doing an OK symbol or whatever happened and everyone learned their lesson.

but since then it's been a parade of "cancel culture is bad, they're out to get me for getting too close to the truth" from bad people with skeletons in their closet trying to cover up their crimes

so yeah, if you're a suddenly right wing comedian podcaster doing 30 minutes of ad reads in your weekly 90 minute podcast about vaccine lockdowns and cancel culture, which they still talk about by the way i know what year it is, you should worry about cancel culture.
 
Actually, I'm kind of sick and tired of numbnuts and their unilaterally deciding who should be cancelled for saying whatever they don't want to hear, and doubly so about comedy. And I don't even care about what side of the political spectrum they're on. Liberal, conservative (which, duly noted, pretty much invented it), left, right, center, up, down, north-by-north-east or whatever.

Everyone just needs to take a flippin' chill pill on the whole 'culture wars' nonsense.

Like, one side is like "OMG, they showed a transsexual in a movie! The world is coming to an end! Cancel them before it's too late!" While the other is like, "OMG, they said they wouldn't date a trans! The NAZIS are taking over the world! Cancel them before it's too late!"

Well, guess what? The former is decades too late to try to stop, and the latter you can't even stop. People will date or refuse to date for all sorts of reasons. Some women literally won't date a guy with a vasectomy, because they want children, while some guys won't date a woman with her tubes tied for the same reason. Get over it. Plus, if your main problem in life is who would date you (and again, it goes for both side of the argument), you're literally telling me you're an INvoluntary CELibate :p

Bloomin' snowflakes all around... Grow a flippin' pair of whatever apropriate for your gender.

And if anyone think thinks that they alone are enlightened enough to be the censor of what a million times more people should be able to see or read... yeah, historical examples of that never went that great.

Anyone who falls in that category, if you want to make a world a better place, here's a simple solution: please go kill yourself. It's not hyperbole, it's not played for laughs, just kill yourself. The world will be better off without that kind of garbage.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Well, I certainly won't fault those directors or wish them to fail, mind you. I can however fault the parent company if it goes doing interviews designed to cause an internet crap-storm, while not actually showing any sign of actually sharing those values. E.g., they SAY they're all for female empowerment in movies, but they still pay their actual RL female employees less. E.g., they SAY they're all for black empowerment in movies, but the black character they come up with is effectively the black receptionist to meet quotas meme. Etc.

And while it might or might not cause them to fail, I hope I can be somewhat excused for the schadenfreude wishing that they did and this trend came finally crashing down.
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I feel like what you've expressed overall is that you think a lot of big studios are pretty bad. Don't think you'll get much argument there. You then think that because studios are pretty bad, if people complain at them for "being woke" (which often amounts to "had a black/female/LGBT significant character) that's GOOD, since the studios are bad any complaints they get are therefore good?

Personally, I think complaints of "stop the woke stuff" might lead to studios not having "woke" plots/black major characters and plots/female major characters and plots/LGBT major characters and plots, there is NO possible reasonable route where "stop the woke stuff" leads to studios being generally better employers and more actually socially proactive.

So this mostly comes across as you being opposed to people actually getting to have media with all the "woke" characters and plots, an that you really resent people having some really great media that they really enjoy.

And apparently you go to internet forums and post about how you're "Sick of all these woke movies with talentless chicks" and then are shocked that people think you're being sexist rather than trying to figure out what reasonable point you're actually trying to make?
 
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