What is wrong with Hollywood?

Let's discuss misandry. Misandry has been driving men away from the box office, away from television, and now from video games: the last refuge that men have in a misandrous world. Examples:

• Ghostbusters
• The Last Jedi
• Ocean's 8
• Terminator 6

The Last Jedi should have been named The Last Straw, because many fans of the hitherto successful franchise decided to stop watching Star Wars movies. It's not because they no longer like Star Wars, it's because they can't stand to look at the shambling undead thing that their previous love has become. The feminists at Disney have finally won: they have made Star Wars fans no longer care about Star Wars. That feeling of numbness in the soul, of torpid apathy, of anhedonia: those are the feelings that they are going for. As a result, later Star Wars movies just did not do well financially. Look at the Solo movie. Most of the die-hard Star Wars fanbase, if unexposed to the Disney Star Wars films, would have waited in line for a week to see a Solo-driven Star Wars film. However, after what Disney has done to this intellectual property, it received a cold reception. Is Disney unconcerned or ignorant?

"It's the customers that're wrong! They ought to want to be educated! They are trolls! They are haters! They are ruining everything!" So They say.

This model can't last forever: eventually, The Cathedral will run out of money. But they just can't stop doing it. It's like some sort of mental illness: an obsession. They can't even begin to understand why their formula doesn't work:

1. Take a brand/intellectual property/genre that has done well in the past by appealing to a largely male audience.
2. Replace the male leads with women and include men only in insulting roles.
3. Attack the fans when they don't like it.

They can afford to fail in the box office because they still have some money left over from the days when they were successful. Rather than donating that money to a church or synagogue, they are offering up these abominable products to their god of Progress. It is a sacrifice to The Cathedral. They don't expect to make money. They don't want to make money. Financial success would mean that they are not properly "schooling" their audience. Anything that is "popular" is not an acceptable sacrifice. Critics have come to hate their audience, and therefore judge the value of something by how few people enjoy it. 

These acts of atonement will continue either until they feel that they have appeased their weird gods, run out of money, or wake up from the nightmare of ideological obsession. 

Their gods, though, are bottomless pits of self-righteous indignation. They cannot be appeased, because they only exist as expressions of dissatisfaction.

They might run out of money, but not immediately. If they're really smart, they'll put out a few sensible pictures here and there to keep them afloat, so they can continue their "great work" of indoctrinating the masses. Ironically, they'll consider their successful movies as sacrifices for their art, but it's really the other way around.

I put small odds on the last possibility because we're not talking about a single individual, but a whole culture. It's groupthink on a grand scale. All these mentally-deranged people are influencing one another and acting as enablers for their awful decisions. It's a cult, put simply, and cultists typically ignore the reality around them because they are focused exclusively on the reinforcement from the cult. So long as the cult continues to reward poor choices with praise and applause, those poor choices will continue to be made. 

Why we laugh

Humor violates our preconceptions and therefore widens our mental representation of the world. The little jolt of pleasure we get is probably an emotional response that exists for the purpose of cementing in that new knowledge so that we remember the new expanded limits of our awareness. That said, for some reason I can never remember jokes.

What is meme warfare?

What is meme warfare?

You can learn anything there is to know from observing nature.

There is a kind of wasp that injects a venom into its victim. It does not kill the victim outright, but paralyzes it, so it can parasitize the victim without spoiling it.

There is another type of wasp that has a venom that zombifies the victim, causing its victim to follow wherever the wasp takes it. The wasp typically leads the victim into a tomb before laying an egg on it that will hatch into a larva that will slowly devour the host alive. The host, though, will not complain or even try to escape, because the venom works on its central nervous system. It will sit there, unable to move, watching its body being devoured, day by day, absolutely helplessly.

Now...

Imagine a super-wasp that has a venom that is so powerful that it not only zombifies the victim, but causes that victim to manufacture more of the same venom and then inject it into its fellows, even its own offspring. The venom prevents the victim from knowing about the venom or the parasite by attacking the higher functions of the central nervous system. The venom makes the victims to look the other away when their fellows are feasted upon, and instead of helping them, they redouble their efforts to distribute more venom, because they see the venom as the solution instead of the disease. After a couple of generations, the entire species is enslaved.

That is what meme warfare is.

Something to remember today

Someone who is both competent and malevolent can easily simulate incompetence.

Competition, willy nilly

People of the world have long been in competition with one another for survival. This happens on an individual level, a corporate level, a racial level, and a national level. Competition has always been there. It will always be there, whether we like it or not.

The most complete and absolute way to defeat someone in a game is to prevent your opponent from even realizing that there is a competition.

Imagine blithely working a puzzle by yourself only to find out after the fact that the first person who completes the puzzle is the winner, making you and everyone else losers. You didn't even know that there was a competition. That's because the game is not fair. Nobody tells you the rules in the game of life: you have to figure them out, or rather, figure out that it IS a game, and that there are no rules except what you can convince other people to agree to.

Competition is upon you, whether you realize it or not. That is not to say that altruism is always wrong. Reciprocal altruism is a good thing, but only if it is reciprocal. Without reciprocation, altruism is weakness that is exploited by competitors.

When you receive, you should feel the weight of obligation to pay back your benefactor. If you do not feel this obligation, then you are unworthy to receive anything.

When you give something to someone, judge their gratitude, and weigh it in terms of obligation and likelihood of reciprocation. Will this person or these people ever provide a benefit to you or your people in return? If not, then they are exploiting you, and you should not allow that exploitation to continue. For your own sake, the sake of your children, corporation, people: do not tolerate exploitation.

Kontrollers

The news these days is all about gun control. There is a pattern here.

First, the legislation has no effect on gun violence. If they were serious, they would look at the statistics. CCW states have less crime. The legislation is not aimed at the kinds of weapons that are used in crimes, but against the kinds of weapons that are used in uprisings.

Also note that the government is not interested in doing anything to stop violence in general: only gun violence. They are afraid of an armed citizenry. Why would a government that represents the will of the people be terrified of those very people they pretend to represent? Why are they afraid of armed citizens? Perhaps they do not represent us. If so, whom do they represent? I wonder.

However, the most striking notion to me is Joe Never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste Biden's philosophy. The whole concept is appalling if you follow the logic. In essence, when a tragedy occurs, the entire nation is emotionally vulnerable. The country is still reeling from the Sandy Hook shooting, and then the government swoops in to pass new anti-gun legislation.

So,to summarize, they wait for the country to be emotionally vulnerable, then they quickly get us to commit to an action (while we are still vulnerable) that has long-term consequences that they know we will regret later.

In interpersonal relationships, what do you call someone who does this? What if someone took advantage of a girl when she is emotionally distraught, and got her to do something she would later regret for the rest of her life? What kind of person is that?

That is the kind of person who is running the country. You, who voted for him, I wonder how you live with yourselves.

Then again, perhaps I am thinking in old-fashioned Victorian morality, in which such things as honor, virtue, and respect applied to regular folks, and were not just neurolinguistic programming contrivances. I don't keep up with modern ideas. Maybe taking emotional advantage of people is cool now, but in my day, we had a word for such people, and it was not flattering.

Whoever thought of putting a country named Turkey near a country named Hungary? It seems like a recipe for trouble.