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Lol that is some cowardly editing by the CCP. Does make it a little more accurate to the book but still, how you gonna cut out that great ending scene? Why? Because it portrays toxic masculinity as powerful and successful? Bullshit.
Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jan 25, 2022 |
# ? Jan 25, 2022 22:01 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 21:48 |
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IIRC the original theme of the book was about a group of castrated losers who sacrifice their identities and even their lives to punch each other in the face because that's the only way they feel alive. In the end, they are too incompetent to even commit suicide. The ending to the film completely undercuts all of that. No longer are they the virgin incels, they are now the chad revolutionaries; scrappy underdogs to be worshiped instead of mocked. Still, how the gently caress you gonna cut out that dope rear end Pixies song?
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# ? Jan 25, 2022 22:33 |
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One of the hallmarks of autocracy I generally speak of when I define the predictive patterns of such state conditions is a paranoid and oppressive cultural control arc. In most cases of growing authoritarianism and autocracy it starts becoming increasingly obvious that they see the need to hyperpolice the depiction of anything anti-authority and anti-establishment, which then quickly (if it wasn't already) the need to hyperpolice anything that challenges heteropatriarchy and traditional masculinism and gender essentialism and always, ALWAYS, a restriction of the ideas that combat establishment hierarchy or challenges injurious states of institutional control of lives. Fight Club has to end with "the police and the system (which you can trust) quickly fixed everything and tyler was fairly dealt with and managed by the police and the system (which, we do not hesitate to add, are trustworthy and good) and was successfully treated for his antisocial illness and reintegrated into society as a Good Boy." While I hate to be the one to willingly introduce comparisons to other countries again, this was actually a primary means by which you could determine the most autocratic periods in american or british history and the corrosive impact it had on culture and institution alike: how up their own rear end are they about such cultural 'protections?' In a place like the united states, it eventually ended up in a situation in which our autocracy lovers (which remain today as they ever were, christian nationalists and dominionists) butted up against anti-establishment free thinkers fighting to expand what ideas are permissible to even speak. You could catch a fingerprint of the zeitgeist watching Frank Zappa and John Lofton butt heads on Crossfire; Lofton sees the only permissible course as the restriction of any viewpoints blasphemous to Christ so as not to corrode the United States, Zappa sees censorship as paranoid overreach by those who wish to micromanage society under their own draconian terms that offer no legitimate benefit to the social welfare. In the united states, the argument takes place in the limited, problematic, but still acceptable fora of a syndicated 1980's debate show. In China today no such debate is allowed to happen; their Lofton equivalent will simply reiterate the necessity of what steps the party takes to control ideas that incite discord and antisocial behavior (and, only incidentally, of course, ideas that challenge the right of the party to rule as it does). Their Zappa equivalent, despite also being a conservative, is permitted no presentation of their ideas.
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# ? Jan 25, 2022 23:15 |
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Kavros posted:In most cases of growing authoritarianism and autocracy it starts becoming increasingly obvious that they see the need to hyperpolice the depiction of anything anti-authority and anti-establishment, which then quickly (if it wasn't already) the need to hyperpolice anything that challenges heteropatriarchy and traditional masculinism and gender essentialism and always, ALWAYS, a restriction of the ideas that combat establishment hierarchy or challenges injurious states of institutional control of lives. Fight Club has to end with "the police and the system (which you can trust) quickly fixed everything and tyler was fairly dealt with and managed by the police and the system (which, we do not hesitate to add, are trustworthy and good) and was successfully treated for his antisocial illness and reintegrated into society as a Good Boy." I'm not sure what you're defining "authoritarian" as, so I'm gonna assume it's "deference to authority". The original Fightclub ending could easily be read as pro-fascist. The evil women and ((((bankers)))) have robbed men of their genetic love for violence, transforming them from the strong alpha warriors of the past into the cucked beta office workers of today. The only way forward is to eschew individuality and follow the unquestionable leadership of the chaddiest Chad, Brad Pitt. All the things that the book portrays as self destructive - violence for the sake of violence, alienation from society, toxic masculinity - could instead be seen as necessary sacrifices for the future because the mission is ultimately successful. Tyler Durton is no longer an idiot madman who fails at everything, he's a grand symbol for masculinity that anyone can become. "Bitch tits" may have died, sure, but everyone's debt is gone. Instead of a pointless and tragic death that points to the futility of the endeavor, now he's a martyr. Basically, the original movie ending could be seen as pulling a reverse Starship troopers - turning antifascist satire into an incel rallying cry. Now, the edit also has obvious "authoritarian" themes, but they kind of flip the script: the authorities shut down a fascist terror cell. It's an interesting example, to be sure. Otherwise, I do object to the idea that western democracies also don't police their own media. The reality is that for decades movies and television were produced almost exclusively by wealthy investors, meaning that all the opinions and themes essentially require oversight from investors to ensure they align with their own ideology. Essentially, every production is headed by a capitalist commissar. The most obvious example is the dozens of WWII movies that feature the Nazis as the villains, the United States as the heroes, and the Soviets as invisible. Anyway, the whole thing is an interesting case study as to how different societies control the discourse portrayed in the media. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jan 26, 2022 |
# ? Jan 26, 2022 00:42 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:capitalist commissar. That's not even remotely how that works. I can't think of a single example that even vaguely resembles what you're trying to suggest with this.
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# ? Jan 26, 2022 02:43 |
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:That's not even remotely how that works. Investors have final decisions on everything. All productions must pass through their scrutiny and therefore will be heavily influenced by their ideologies. Edit: Specifically, pro capitalist and anti communist narratives.
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# ? Jan 26, 2022 03:24 |
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That is unfortunately one of the least tenuous reaches for equivalency you could have made between state censorship in despotic nations and media production in 'western democracies' You do not have to have a fantasy condition of "investors and production companies make absolutely no conditional requirements in exchange for their investment in the production of a movie" before a generally liberal or social democratic country's media is allowed to be considered substantively different from those of autocracies with wide-ranging and strict state censorship and media containment policies. This is true even before you account for the thousands of movies, including celebrated high profile ones, that get made and promoted in clear and shocking defiance of the Capitalist Commissar Board
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# ? Jan 26, 2022 04:52 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Investors have final decisions on everything. All productions must pass through their scrutiny and therefore will be heavily influenced by their ideologies. This is not true at all. You can be a major investor and have no voting rights in a company. Splitting economic and voting rights is very common and is how tech founders retain so much control despite minority economic rights. Most investors don't even have board seats and just receive reports. Boards often don't even exercise that much control. Much of the decision-making is delegated to the CEO and management. Take venture capital, for instance. A fund may have 100 investors. Their investments are effectively locked away for 10 years. The general partners that manage the fund are picking the investments. Maybe they have an investment committee to advise them. The investors have gently caress-all say in those investments. They just get the quarterly or annual updates, and they're happy with it as long as it's generating good returns. In fact, if the returns are good enough, they'll line up for the next fund the VC is raising and make their investment with basically whatever conditions the VC requires. I'm not as familiar with financing in Hollywood, but my understanding is that it's somewhat similar. Investors are competing with each other to get the deals with the best producers, either because they can deliver the best returns or for ego reasons (awards, starfucking, etc.). The best producers dictate the terms and retain extreme creative control. There are also plenty of great movies and TV shoes that are highly critical of capitalism and of American society in general. Nomadland won the best picture award in 2021 and had a Chinese director to boot. China has also had some fantastic movies that are critical of contemporary Chinese society. A Touch of Sin is one of the best movies of the last few decades, but sadly I don't even it would even get made today. In general this view of capitalism as being driven by some global Masters of Atlantis cabal is... off. Capitalism is not an overt ideology so much as a system in which actors unwittingly contribute to its perpetuation (though admittedly there are now capitalism cultists in a way there weren't before). This was one of the key insights of Marx. Individual capitalists are not necessarily bad people. Some might even be great employers and altruistic. But they are still driven by a system that causes great cumulative suffering, especially to workers. They are not individually responsible for the system and the economic relations of society, and in fact they are controlled by it much like everyone.
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# ? Jan 26, 2022 05:36 |
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I found this exchange amusing on mutual holes in collective memory: https://twitter.com/donaldcclarke/status/1485811490812833796 the book extract is also apropos to a thread favourite topic (written from a Chinese perspective - Yugoslavia was prominent in Chinese intelligentsia consciousness in the 2000s due to the NATO Belgrade embassy bombing; China backed Milošević during the war even before the event, but sharply escalated its response in 1999 due to an unfortunate coincidence of events - pre-emptive clashes ahead of upcoming student protests on the anniversary of 6/4, the shock appearance of 10,000+ Falun Gong practitioners in an silent protest outside Zhongnanhai that caught security completely by surprise, and two weeks later the Belgrade bombing; the confluence of these events led to unusually open permitted discussion of the Yugoslavian war in early 2000s China) ronya fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Jan 26, 2022 |
# ? Jan 26, 2022 07:40 |
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Smeef posted:This is not true at all. You can be a major investor and have no voting rights in a company. Splitting economic and voting rights is very common and is how tech founders retain so much control despite minority economic rights. Most investors don't even have board seats and just receive reports. Boards often don't even exercise that much control. Much of the decision-making is delegated to the CEO and management. Most CEOs and high level management are paid heavily with stocks. Many times, the ceo is not only an investor but the investor who owns more stock than anyone else. For example, the Ceo of Amazon is Jeff Bezos, the largest holder of Amazon stock in the world. Same for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, bill gates and microsoft (before he retired), etc. More to the point, those positions are appointed either directly or indirectly by investors specifically to act in their interest. So really it's a system where investors elevate a smaller group of investors to make decisions on behalf of the larger group of investors. A representative democracy where voting power is determined by wealth. And to paint any of this as a "cabal" is very silly. Every part of this complicated system is right out there in the open. They collaborate in public and they make public decisions. The only thing they do in secret is gently caress children. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jan 26, 2022 |
# ? Jan 26, 2022 15:02 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Most CEOs and high level management are paid heavily with stocks. Many times, the ceo is not only an investor but the investor who owns more stock than anyone else. For example, the Ceo of Amazon is Jeff Bezos, the largest holder of Amazon stock in the world. Same for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, bill gates and microsoft (before he retired), etc. More to the point, those positions are appointed either directly or indirectly by investors specifically to act in their interest. So really it's a system where investors elevate a smaller group of investors to make decisions on behalf of the larger group of investors. A representative democracy where voting power is determined by wealth. This is not about China and is no longer even about media or movies, so it'll be my last post on this topic. Having equity does not make you an investor. Bezos and Zuckerberg haven't paid in a penny to their companies since raising their first round of external financing. They may have paid nothing outside of whatever out-of-pocket expenses they had during initial setup. And employees the world over are paid in equity (both as a form of compensation and ostensibly to align management/staff with shareholders and prevent principal-agent problems), but it does not make them investors. It makes them shareholders. (You can also be an investor and have no equity. That is debt.) Yes, typically good corporate governance means that a Board hires and fires the CEO, may vote on certain decisions depending on the by-laws, may provide some guidance, etc. Being a shareholder does not guarantee a board seat, though, and plenty of board seats go to independent directors with no stake. Plenty of Boards are rubber stamps. Bezos and Zuckerberg in particular are not examples of typical CEO-Board relationships. Ironically, they are examples of having more voting power than economic rights — i.e., voting power is not determined by wealth. Neither was ever appointed. Jeff Bezos is no longer the CEO of Amazon but ran it with dictatorial power and still has the plurality of ownership and voting rights. Andy Jassy is the CEO, and he was handpicked by Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg owns about 14% of Facebook but has about 58% of the voting shares. He can do drat near whatever the hell he wants. And to provide something that is China-related and interesting: Rising private city operators in contemporary China: A study of the CFLD model https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275119304275 quote:In the past decade, with the rise of private investment in urban development in China, there has been a profound transformation from government-led to market-led urban growth. These changes have created a boom in private city operators who have become involved in large-scale urban development and established long-term close public-private partnerships with local governments, integrating and optimizing all of the resources in a city or region. I wonder how this article will age, given the current property market conditions. It surprised me given how much we've recently been talking about retrenchment of state control of the economy and is a reminder that policies in China are often moving in different directions, sometimes in opposing directions, at the same time. Smeef fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jan 26, 2022 |
# ? Jan 26, 2022 16:10 |
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Smeef posted:
I'm not sure exactly it is we're disagreeing with here except maybe exact word definitions. Edit: just to be clear, that doesn't mean every schmuck with a 401k portfolio is an "investor", or at least are not the people in talking about. quote:Being a shareholder does not guarantee a board seat, though, and plenty of board seats go to independent directors with no stake. It's no coincidence that CEOS are paid with stock options, this is intentionally done to materially tie ceo decisions to investor profits more than just by contractual obligations. Anything a CEO does to benefit stockholders also benefits himself because he is also a stockholder. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jan 26, 2022 |
# ? Jan 26, 2022 16:25 |
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https://www.pnas.org/content/119/4/e2102818119quote:While the results here do not link the COVID-19 crisis gateway effect to the political fortunes of the Chinese government, they do suggest that a country with a highly censored environment sees distinctive and wide-ranging increases in information access during crisis. While in normal times censorship can be highly effective and widely tolerated, crisis heightens incentives to circumvent censorship, and regimes cannot rely on the same limits on information access during crisis, even for topics long controlled. A neat little paper that came out in the past couple of days. How does one actually circumvent the Great Firewall of China and what are the consequences of doing so? I imagine you just VPN through but how often does the CCP block VPN routes?
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 03:48 |
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MikeC posted:https://www.pnas.org/content/119/4/e2102818119 Quite often from what I’ve read. It’s kinda a cat and mouse game though.
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 04:46 |
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quote:these findings demonstrate that during crisis access to information fundamentally changes in autocracies in patterns that differ from democracies. Information spillovers originating from crisis could be especially pronounced when a regime has previously censored a large amount of political information and circumvention tools provide access to a wide variety of current and historical censored content. That information seeking during crisis spills over to unrelated and previously censored content in authoritarian contexts is related to previously studied gateway effects where the Chinese government’s action to suddenly block a primarily entertainment website facilitated access to censored political information (9). This tracks with direct family sources about how it more or less worked in north korea during exceptional crisis. The majority of information spillover was predicated by situations involving gross economic collapse or major disruptive disaster and often required it. Also, the realities of crisis make people more daring in seeking out new media even if just for basic escapism, and as north korean media remained static, anachronistic, and monodirected to regime praise and overt instructional messaging about proper mindsets and labor of the people, people got daring enough to really go for foreign produced media. dramas. movies. comedies. news broadcasts. anything. But more importantly, the centralized systems given sole control of most vital goods distribution were very poorly designed and prone to sporadic or complete collapse even in 'good' times, but any suggestion that things weren't working perfectly were forbidden unless it could be blamed on a foreign actor ... so it became lifesaving pragmatism for most korean heads of household to try to source real information or news on conditions inside the country or what might be coming up. And as jangmadangs and private black market commerce replaced critically collapsed centralized systems, that started the first real pipelines. Anyway, it ends up an interesting contrast, since China's incredibly different what with the general competence and the whole 'delivering on the promise of greater prosperity and security' thing for most people.
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 07:31 |
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https://twitter.com/yangxifan/status/1486709893729959944 Worth reading the thread. In particular: https://twitter.com/yangxifan/status/1486710006430846989
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 17:22 |
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drat, are the Olympics just a week away? I guess we'll see what happens when the rubber meets the road.
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 17:25 |
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1.2 million people is 0.08% of chinas population, doesn’t seem that crazy that it’s not a bigger story. It’s hard to even find the place on Google maps.
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 17:41 |
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Android Blues posted:It's also not at all close to the book ending - what a weird thing to bring up. The book ending is that the bombing fails due to the protagonist being incompetent at bomb-making, but the secret society's infiltration of bougie polity continues with the implication that it's been so successful it's now endemic. It does not glorify or validate the state - it's a joke about a grand anarchist plot that is thwarted by tripping over its own feet. Even then, the implication is that in the future, there'll probably be a successful bombing, because the ideas that propelled the first one are powerful, rooted in some kind of truth, and aren't going away. The author has responded, FWIW, and he believes it to be closer to the book ending. You might want to calibrate your weirdness meter. https://ew.com/movies/fight-club-censored-ending-china-chuck-palahniuk/ posted:There's one person who doesn't seem too fussed by the new censored Chinese ending to the 1999 film Fight Club — and that's author Chuck Palahniuk. I only read some of Chuck’s stories and his Portland book, but just based on those and knowing some of what he experienced as an author I thought he’d get a kick out of it and not really give a poo poo.
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 21:32 |
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idk how familiar you are with what palahniuk is generally up to these days, but good luck making much sense of what's going on in his weird fuckin head https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/20/chuck-palahniuk-interview-adjustment-day-black-ethno-state-gay-parenting-incel-movement on the plus side if you want to read about american splitaway states of Blacktopia, Gaysia (his names, btw), and the white incel country, you should definitely read his recent work
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# ? Jan 27, 2022 21:49 |
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mawarannahr posted:
Considering how much sexual "deviance" his books have, it's not surprising. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jan 27, 2022 |
# ? Jan 27, 2022 21:54 |
Cpt_Obvious posted:The only thing they do in secret is gently caress children. Well yeah, they’re not Qin Shihuang, they can’t cite health reasons and just do it publicly. Although it’s amusing to imagine the world’s billionaires all following a mercury-based regimen.
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 09:45 |
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小三 mistress and 劝酒 professional KTV culture is still prevalent in contemporary Chinese government business, fwiw
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 10:53 |
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Herstory Begins Now posted:idk how familiar you are with what palahniuk is generally up to these days, but good luck making much sense of what's going on in his weird fuckin head Palahniuk has always been like that. He is an extremely weird dude. Good author though. Also it's fair to consider him an authority on his own book
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 18:53 |
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I think even caring that "well it is closer to the original" is missing the problem in the first place. Why would they find the need to change the ending in the first place?
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:00 |
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GoutPatrol posted:I think even caring that "well it is closer to the original" is missing the problem in the first place. Why would they find the need to change the ending in the first place? Exactly, it's entirely immaterial to the question raised by the censorship: what is there to fear from a simple movie? Does a healthy society and polity need to fear and censor art? e: I'll add my own whattaboutism, for fun: in the US right now we are seeing a rash of conservative municipalities rushing to censor children's books and literature that they find threatening to their politics. This is not a sign of a healthy society. It's driven by fear and paranoia and hatred.
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:02 |
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quote:Also it's fair to consider him an authority on his own book Mmmm, no.
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:07 |
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How are u posted:Exactly, it's entirely immaterial to the question raised by the censorship: what is there to fear from a simple movie? Does a healthy society and polity need to fear and censor art? If the purpose of art is to provoke conversation then this has succeeded more than any other piece in recent memory. China wins again!
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:08 |
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GoutPatrol posted:I think even caring that "well it is closer to the original" is missing the problem in the first place. Why would they find the need to change the ending in the first place? Cpt_Obvious posted:The original Fightclub [movie] ending could easily be read as pro-fascist. The evil women and ((((bankers)))) have robbed men of their genetic love for violence, transforming them from the strong alpha warriors of the past into the cucked beta office workers of today. The only way forward is to eschew individuality and follow the unquestionable leadership of the chaddiest Chad, Brad Pitt. All the things that the book portrays as self destructive - violence for the sake of violence, alienation from society, toxic masculinity - could instead be seen as necessary sacrifices for the future because the mission is ultimately successful. Tyler Durton is no longer an idiot madman who fails at everything, he's a grand symbol for masculinity that anyone can become. "Bitch tits" may have died, sure, but everyone's debt is gone. Instead of a pointless and tragic death that points to the futility of the endeavor, now he's a martyr.
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:15 |
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This is a personal bugbear for me, but for the love of god this is not what barthes' meant when he wrote the essay, and I really wish people would actually learn what it was about before doing this. The idea behind death of the author was to argue against the idea that a reading OF the text must be informed by your knowledge of the author. Barthes rejects the idea that the sole method of reading themes in a text must come from biographical information. Like, "Ah, this novel's themes are clearly them working out their experiences in the War, or with their own depression". In this specific case, when someone says Palahniuk is an authority in the written events of the novel, well of COURSE he is. He wrote it! He knows the plot.
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:41 |
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GoutPatrol posted:I think even caring that "well it is closer to the original" is missing the problem in the first place. Why would they find the need to change the ending in the first place? The more salient part of what Palahniuk is saying is that Fight Club has faced continuous censorship/modification since its publication, and yet people only seem to care when it can be used as a bludgeon against an enemy government
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:56 |
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Red and Black posted:For my part, I think it sucks that they edited the ending. Why do you think they edited the ending?
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# ? Jan 28, 2022 23:57 |
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Varinn posted:This is a personal bugbear for me, but for the love of god this is not what barthes' meant when he wrote the essay, and I really wish people would actually learn what it was about before doing this. Thank you, thank you, for the love of god
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 00:02 |
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It doesn't matter if the movie is different from the book because that's the point of an adaptation, you are allowed the freedom to change things. The movie is its own thing. So the question is not whether the censored ending is closer to some sacred idea of an "original text", but rather, is it right that the state should decide how media and art should be read?
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 00:03 |
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Rabelais D posted:It doesn't matter if the movie is different from the book because that's the point of an adaptation, you are allowed the freedom to change things. The movie is its own thing. So the question is not whether the censored ending is closer to some sacred idea of an "original text", but rather, is it right that the state should decide how media and art should be read? The state will censor media, that's what states do. The better question is "what are they censoring and why? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 00:40 |
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This kinda makes me think of The Shining, and how glad I am Kubrick's version was so different from King's book. If it wasn't I think the movie would have sucked but as it is it's one of the best horror movies ever made and a lot of adaptations of King's books that don't change much end up very meh. But I'm glad both the book and movie exist and that neither are censored.
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 01:51 |
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China Jails Almost 50 Steel Executives for Faking Emissions Data https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-jails-almost-50-steel-executives-for-faking-emissions-data quote:BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) - China will jail forty-seven steel company officials for faking air pollution data, in a sign that Beijing's crackdown on firms that are flouting environmental rules is intensifying.
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 02:29 |
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China's forcing it's economy to become even more competitive by creating a monopoly on green tech. Because of trumps rollbacks and no BBB, we will end up purchasing all of our green tech from China because we are too gridlocked to do anything about the climate disaster.
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 02:33 |
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The idea that "The state will censor media, that's what states do" is not true but for a ludicrous simplification of the concept.
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 07:05 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 21:48 |
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Discendo Vox posted:The idea that "The state will censor media, that's what states do" is not true but for a ludicrous simplification of the concept. Any institution with sufficient power will shape and influence the media into a form it finds advantageous
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# ? Jan 29, 2022 07:16 |