The Predator That Makes Great White Sharks Flee in Fear - "The great white shark—a fast, powerful, 16-foot-long torpedo that’s armed to the teeth with teeth—has little to fear except fear itself. But also: killer whales... Combining both brains and brawn, orcas have been known to kill sharks in surprisingly complicated ways. Some will drive their prey to the surface and then karate chop them with overhead tail swipes. Others seem to have worked out that they can hold sharks upside-down to induce a paralytic state called tonic immobility. Orcas can kill the fastest species (makos) and the largest (whale sharks)."
Latinx author speaks on race. Georgia Southern students burn her book - "some students questioned why the author had been critical of white people.“I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged”... Capó Crucet later tweeted that some people had made "aggressive & ignorant comments" during the question-and-answer session. One white student, she said in a statement, "questioned whether I had the authority to address issues of race and white privilege on campus.""
In a university, you are not allowed to question the gospel of anti-racism - it means you are ignorant
Talk of ‘anti-white sentiment’ distracts from the fight against institutional racism - "We’d been asked to participate in an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) consultation into racial harassment on campuses, which is now the subject of a new report. I remember feeling exhausted, either owing to finishing an essay late the night before, or at the prospect that I and other people of colour would be once again detailing and reliving the racial trauma we face... imagine my surprise when one of the facilitators casually mentioned “anti-white prejudice”. We had just spent an hour collectively explaining our experiences of institutional racism and, looking across the room, I saw confused faces. We probed and challenged: isn’t this a report focused on racial harassment?... 9% of white British students have felt they were victims of racial harassment evidenced by the presence of “anti-English”, “anti-Welsh” or “anti-Scottish” sentiment... By conflating xenophobia, anti-English sentiment and prejudice with the racism faced by students and academics of colour, the EHRC has done a disservice to the work currently being done on race equity in the UK... [racism is] the cause of the BAME attainment gap, where BAME students are 13% less likely to receive a 2:1 or a first in comparison to our white counterparts – even though we start at the same entry point... It is exhausting that we still cannot have a frank discussion about experiences of structural racism without positioning white people as equal victims of racial discrimination – and it shows the limitations of the language our legislative bodies are using... Many people are still reluctant to truly understand what racism is, confining themselves to dictionary definitions... all language used in race equity needs to be interrogated for its failings, flaws and uses"
Yet another frank admission that "anti-racism" is about hating white people. Notably, he isn't consistent in terminology - the usual "academic" line is that "racism" is power + prejudice, but now the author is slipping into claiming that white people can't experience prejudice or harassment either
Also it's typical that just talking is "trauma"
Ironically, conflating things like coming from a single family (which affects life outcomes) with racism is a good thing
I'm sure the author will insist anyone criticising feminism refer to the textbook definition to "prove" that feminism is about equality. Or maybe he will import the logic of anti-racism there to say men can't suffer from gender discrimination
Naturally it ends with a 1984esque language policing
Woman 'deserved' violent rape for 'slavery,' suspect allegedly said - "“She was a white girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery,” Temar Bishop, 23, allegedly said to someone who witnessed the bloodied 20-year-old woman after the assaults, according to a criminal complaint. “This is what they used to do to us. This is what they did to us during slavery. They used to beat us and whip us.”"
When you keep stirring anti-white hatred
'An indictment of South Africa': whites-only town Orania is booming - "Oranians claim the town is a cultural project, not a racial one. Only Afrikaners are allowed to live and work there to preserve Afrikaner culture... The town exists at the mercy of the South African constitution. In the early 2000s, a planned remapping of boundaries that would have brought Orania under the control of a democratically elected municipality appeared to spell the end, but the town successfully appealed to the high court using the constitutional rights of the country’s minority cultural groups... The town’s doctor, Philip Nothnagel, describes South African cities as “warzones”. He lived in the country’s administrative capital, Pretoria, before he moved to Orania. The 10 months since have been the best of his life... Boshoff fears white Afrikaners face a real threat of “being wiped out”, either through violence or what he calls “amalgamation”"
One could look at this as a safe space for a minority (indeed a sign to European journalists uses this term)
We went to a Japanese restaurant in Italy, ate green sushi, learned a lesson about taking it easy - "When he was craving a taste of home in Sicily, he decided to check out a Japanese restaurant, though right from the start something felt a bit off... he decided to order one of the mysterious green sushi. Exploring unknown territory is a journalist’s duty, after all! …and was pleasantly surprised that it was actually pretty tasty! It turns out the green component of the roe is actually wasabi, whose flavor shot right up through his mouth to his nose. Despite that positive experience though, Yuichiro still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in a “Ristorante Cinese” instead of a “Ristorante Giapponese”.
The “yakitori” (grilled chicken skewer) was fried and looked like Chinese cuisine… …the tempura came with a sweet and sour sauce, not its typical soy sauce and dashi… …and even the cookie Yuichiro was given as he left the restaurant felt very Chinese.
But what Yuichiro found most odd was that everything on the menu was all-you-can-eat. And, unlike restaurants in Japan that have a time limit for all-you-can-eat establishments, this restaurant had no time limit. “You can just eat whatever you like until you’re full”, the waitress told Yuichiro, leaving him dumbfounded.“But won’t that mean that this restaurant will always be filled with greedy, impolite people?” he wondered to himself.That’s when it hit him. Yuichiro looked around, and what he saw surprised him: groups of people spending a long time in the restaurant simply enjoying each other’s company, and not to stuff their bellies full of food. There didn’t seem to be anyone greedily piling food onto their plates with the malicious intention of stretching their cash.In fact, the only impolite person in the restaurant turned out to be Yuichiro himself, judging the place too harshly... Sometimes, not fretting over details like how your chicken is cooked or the sauce of your tempura makes for a better time. It was only when Yuchiro learned that, relaxed, and enjoyed his food for what it was, not judging it for what it wasn’t, that he finally felt at ease."
Our Japanese language reporter visits a U.K. sushi chain, is blown away by its original “sushi” - "What he ended up getting was far from anything he’d ever tasted in Japan; in fact, the originality of Yo! Sushi’s menu really blew him away. Even from the outside, Seiji doubted that they truly sold sushi. Though the name of the restaurant contained the word “sushi”, to Seiji, based on the menu posted in the window outside, it didn’t look like they sold any sushi he knew of... although these dishes were nothing like what one might expect at sushi restaurant in Japan, the flavors of each of Yo! Sushi’s rolls were actually pretty good, aside from the fact that the rice was a little bit gooey. In fact, with a little bit of the ol’ soy sauce, they were quite delicious. It might be better if you think of Yo! Sushi’s offerings not quite as Japanese sushi but as more of a Western experimental cuisine, so as not to feel disappointment by certain aspects, like the distinct lack of seaweed... Though to be honest, we’re not really sure why Seiji was so surprised, because Japan has its fair share of weird sushi rolls, too, like the one topped with pizza, the sushi burritos, and deep-fried sushi"
Mushrooms can provide as much vitamin D as supplements - but only if you put them in the sun before you eat them - "Mushrooms exposed to the sun can provide as much vitamin D as a health supplement, a study has found.Researchers recommend people take the fungi out of their wrapping and leave them outside for half an hour before eating... 'Many experts believe that cooking will not damage the vitamin levels, and it is perfectly stable with heat. If anything, it make it far easier to absorb the nutrient.'"
Christopher Johnson Charged After Missing Florida Teen's Mom Her In Porn Video - "A missing Florida teen has been found almost a year after she disappeared after her distraught mom found sexually explicit photos and video of her on PornHub.The teen’s mother spotted the videos in September and told investigators—who later uncovered nearly 60 pornographic videos of the missing 15-year-old on Periscope, Pornhub, Modelhub, Snapchat and other websites"
Politically Incorrect D.Va II: Gamers Never Die - Posts - "Madam President @queer_anthology: "Friendly reminder that if you're not Mexican you shouldn't be doing Sugar Skulls (katrinas) for Halloween. Just be a skeleton. Remember dia de los muertos has cultural and religious significance.""
"How about you know your role and shut your mouth. As a Mexican/English person posts like this really annoy me, Mexican people love seeing their culture outside Latin America and it's a positive thing that culture gets appreciated by others, don't get offended on our behalf loser."
LOVE SAUSAGE on Twitter - "Friendly reminder that if you're not Celtic you shouldn't be doing Halloween. Just stay at home. Remember Samhaìn has cultural and religious significance."
Replies: "If you aren’t Germanic you shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, it’s appropriation of a holy Germanic holiday season. Remember YULE has cultural and religious significance"
"Friendly reminder that if you're not germanic you shouldn't celebrate easter. Remember Ôstarmânoth has cultural and religious significance."
🦇Ansgar Odinson🦇 on Twitter - "How to be the art police, a story in 4 parts.
Assert that no woman would ever
Block anyone who is inconvenient
Erase women who dont fit your narrative
Credit to @unvarnishedvoid"
"Amanda Logan @luthien_seregon: "Women aren't drawing this kind of art in the geek community. Lesbians definitely are not. This isn't some Trumpian 'both sides do ittttt'. Enjoying big boob IRL or even in art again isn't the critique"
"unvarnished @unvarnishedvoid: "hi im a female and i drew this. so kindly f*ck off :D""
"You're blocked. You can't follow or see @luthien@seregon's Tweets"
"Amanda Logan @luthien_seregon: "Nope. Thought they were a man and blocked them. Why do u care tho? I block and mute freely & make no secret of it. Do they want to chat?"
This is like the guy who claimed no pro-lifer had ever answered his thought experiment about abortion honesty - because he blocked everyone who had
Ill boy, 2, dies after ‘cruel dad blows £115,000 crowdfunding donations on brothels, luxury holidays and drugs’ - "Father Mateus Henrique Leroy Alves, 37, was arrested in July on suspicion of spending £114,060 (600,000 R$) of the money raised online to help treat his two-year-old son Joao Miguel’s type 1 spinal muscular atrophy."
Marvel Comments on Sales and 'Forced Diversity' at NYCC Panel - "At New York Comic Con, Women of Marvel podcast hosts Sana Amanat and Judy Stephens held a panel alongside assistant editor Kathleen Wisneski, writer Margaret Stohl, writer Leah Williams, colorist Rachelle Rosenberg and artist Jen Bartel. The purpose of this panel was to discuss what it's like working in comics from a female perspective and what fans can expect from Marvel in the future.During the panel's Q&A session, a young female fan brought up the topic of dipping sales, asking the panelists if they believed decreased sales were due to "forced diversity" and "hiring people without experience.""
'Black-ish' Creator: I Don't Want To See 'Forced Diversity' In Hollywood - "For “black-ish” creator, Kenya Barris, the conversation regarding the actor's comment begin with diversity hires... he has noticed an overall counterproductive process to diversify Hollywood.“I don’t necessarily want to see forced diversity, because I’ve been a beneficiary and a victim of that in some aspects,” Barris said. “If you put something in place where a person is put into a situation and they’re put into that situation under the guise that this is the ‘diversity hire,' that person -- 95% of the time -- will not be given the respect in order to make the career to open the doors for other people behind them.""
Saturday, December 28, 2019
How to Save $32 Million in One Hour
How to Save $32 Million in One Hour (Ep. 397) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"[On nudging] HALPERN: So, one of the key points is, most things don’t work. And that’s actually quite a difficult truth for people to come to terms with. There’s probably half a dozen which are sort of billion-dollar-impact plus. And then you’ve got quite a lot of things which are quite small impacts, and lots that don’t work...
Top ones would be things like pensions. It’s a famous one. Getting people to pay their tax on time, now very widely used and replicated across the world. Less well-known, interventions on e-cigarettes, we think, is definitely a billion dollar-plus in terms of its impact... adding that one line — “9 out of 10 people pay that tax on time” — would that lead to people then just paying up without further prompt? With no further action? And the answer is yes, it did, and indeed we tried multiple variations. Back then, that was unbelievably controversial... it was felt — lots of reasons why — “What, you want to start experimenting on people?” And “the system wasn’t built to do it.” There were even questions about how would you analyze it?...
HALPERN: There is some evidence that giving people some say in — “What would you want to pay your tax on” — “I’ll say no to the nuclear warheads but I’ll say okay to the, you know” — “If there was a marginal extra pound or dollar, what would you prioritize?” — that actually people do feel better about it. And one of the quite deep questions even buried in there is that people do feel quite good when they give money to charities, right? In fact, as you’ll know from the behavioral literature, better than they think that they’ll feel. Why not when they pay their taxes? Why wouldn’t you feel good that you’re supporting schools and hospitals and so on? So one of the objectives of a tax authority, in my view, should not only be to collect the revenue, but actually help people feel okay about it. Why not?...
Images of homes showing — infrared images showing how much heat they’re losing. Putting them on a request to get your home insulated turns out to make people significantly less likely to get their home insulated. There was good lab work suggesting it was a good idea, but it looks like people were like, “Oh, that looks warm. That’s cozy. I’ll keep it.” Getting people who go to major airports to switch to public transport — really big effort — did absolutely diddly-squat.
Grit — a grit-based intervention, we’ve done a number of interventions with 16-, 17-year-olds. Some worked incredibly, but we found that grit-based intervention, at least in the U.K.— it did increase attendance rates, but it didn’t increase the pass rates. One was getting managers to be more sympathetic towards, basically, senior female staff. We spent a long time with a lot of academics designing this perfect intervention. It had the exact reverse effect. Getting male managers to be attentive in this particular way — they actually were less, ultimately, sympathetic...
MURRAY: If you are subject to a burglary, sadly, you’re at increased risk of being subject to a burglary again. And in the very near future. But not only that. Your neighbors are, and your neighbors’ neighbors, up to 400 yards either side of the house... in the treatment area, if you were one of those houses that was at a high risk of burglary, or near repeat burglary, i.e., you were a neighbor, within 24 hours we sent an officer around who had a big sticker of an Alsatian and they stuck it on the door...
There was less repeat victimization in the test area compared to the control area. In, actually the lower-crime areas, we did see statistically significant reductions in repeat offending, repeat victimization...
This is my favorite experiment of all times. So if you go into a police cell in the U.K. — I don’t know, you probably both experienced it — where you sit and you look a blank wall for anything up to 24 hours, there might be a stencil on the wall that says, “If you want to get off drugs, phone this number.” But pretty much nothing happens. So we thought — well, captive audience. And we put a load of graffiti on loads of cell walls, and this was growth-mindset graffiti. Positive messaging purporting to be from an offender who’d previously been in there and graffitied on the walls...
“People think that what they do makes them who they are. It doesn’t. We all do stuff because we got angry, because we felt good, or we didn’t think. I was pretty good at blaming others. But when I was here, I realized that this time it’s on me. What I do is my choice and I chose something else. When I left, I did things differently and it took effort. I won’t lie. But it paid off. Think, what’s the one thing you can do to make sure you don’t end up back here? Remember, and when a door opens, do it. It’s never too late.”... it had no effect whatsoever... It might be that growth mindset in a cell wall just doesn’t work...
PATEL: Changing generic prescribing rates. And we were able to move the needle significantly, from 75 percent to 98 percent, almost overnight... a rogue IT person was implementing something else around prescribing. And actually noticed this and said, “I’m just going to put a checkbox here, and if they don’t check that box, the prescription is going to go to the pharmacy as generic.” And the next week or so, the health system got a phone call from our largest insurer and said, “You just went from last place to first place in generic prescribing. Instead of penalizing you, we’re going to give you a bonus.” And the first thing everyone said is, “This is not possible. We’ve been last for years.” And then we realized what had happened: one hour of work resulted in $32 million of savings in the course of two years...
HALPERN: If we take that simple trust question, “Do you think other people can be trusted?” It’s a better predictor of national economic growth rates than levels of human capital."
"[On nudging] HALPERN: So, one of the key points is, most things don’t work. And that’s actually quite a difficult truth for people to come to terms with. There’s probably half a dozen which are sort of billion-dollar-impact plus. And then you’ve got quite a lot of things which are quite small impacts, and lots that don’t work...
Top ones would be things like pensions. It’s a famous one. Getting people to pay their tax on time, now very widely used and replicated across the world. Less well-known, interventions on e-cigarettes, we think, is definitely a billion dollar-plus in terms of its impact... adding that one line — “9 out of 10 people pay that tax on time” — would that lead to people then just paying up without further prompt? With no further action? And the answer is yes, it did, and indeed we tried multiple variations. Back then, that was unbelievably controversial... it was felt — lots of reasons why — “What, you want to start experimenting on people?” And “the system wasn’t built to do it.” There were even questions about how would you analyze it?...
HALPERN: There is some evidence that giving people some say in — “What would you want to pay your tax on” — “I’ll say no to the nuclear warheads but I’ll say okay to the, you know” — “If there was a marginal extra pound or dollar, what would you prioritize?” — that actually people do feel better about it. And one of the quite deep questions even buried in there is that people do feel quite good when they give money to charities, right? In fact, as you’ll know from the behavioral literature, better than they think that they’ll feel. Why not when they pay their taxes? Why wouldn’t you feel good that you’re supporting schools and hospitals and so on? So one of the objectives of a tax authority, in my view, should not only be to collect the revenue, but actually help people feel okay about it. Why not?...
Images of homes showing — infrared images showing how much heat they’re losing. Putting them on a request to get your home insulated turns out to make people significantly less likely to get their home insulated. There was good lab work suggesting it was a good idea, but it looks like people were like, “Oh, that looks warm. That’s cozy. I’ll keep it.” Getting people who go to major airports to switch to public transport — really big effort — did absolutely diddly-squat.
Grit — a grit-based intervention, we’ve done a number of interventions with 16-, 17-year-olds. Some worked incredibly, but we found that grit-based intervention, at least in the U.K.— it did increase attendance rates, but it didn’t increase the pass rates. One was getting managers to be more sympathetic towards, basically, senior female staff. We spent a long time with a lot of academics designing this perfect intervention. It had the exact reverse effect. Getting male managers to be attentive in this particular way — they actually were less, ultimately, sympathetic...
MURRAY: If you are subject to a burglary, sadly, you’re at increased risk of being subject to a burglary again. And in the very near future. But not only that. Your neighbors are, and your neighbors’ neighbors, up to 400 yards either side of the house... in the treatment area, if you were one of those houses that was at a high risk of burglary, or near repeat burglary, i.e., you were a neighbor, within 24 hours we sent an officer around who had a big sticker of an Alsatian and they stuck it on the door...
There was less repeat victimization in the test area compared to the control area. In, actually the lower-crime areas, we did see statistically significant reductions in repeat offending, repeat victimization...
This is my favorite experiment of all times. So if you go into a police cell in the U.K. — I don’t know, you probably both experienced it — where you sit and you look a blank wall for anything up to 24 hours, there might be a stencil on the wall that says, “If you want to get off drugs, phone this number.” But pretty much nothing happens. So we thought — well, captive audience. And we put a load of graffiti on loads of cell walls, and this was growth-mindset graffiti. Positive messaging purporting to be from an offender who’d previously been in there and graffitied on the walls...
“People think that what they do makes them who they are. It doesn’t. We all do stuff because we got angry, because we felt good, or we didn’t think. I was pretty good at blaming others. But when I was here, I realized that this time it’s on me. What I do is my choice and I chose something else. When I left, I did things differently and it took effort. I won’t lie. But it paid off. Think, what’s the one thing you can do to make sure you don’t end up back here? Remember, and when a door opens, do it. It’s never too late.”... it had no effect whatsoever... It might be that growth mindset in a cell wall just doesn’t work...
PATEL: Changing generic prescribing rates. And we were able to move the needle significantly, from 75 percent to 98 percent, almost overnight... a rogue IT person was implementing something else around prescribing. And actually noticed this and said, “I’m just going to put a checkbox here, and if they don’t check that box, the prescription is going to go to the pharmacy as generic.” And the next week or so, the health system got a phone call from our largest insurer and said, “You just went from last place to first place in generic prescribing. Instead of penalizing you, we’re going to give you a bonus.” And the first thing everyone said is, “This is not possible. We’ve been last for years.” And then we realized what had happened: one hour of work resulted in $32 million of savings in the course of two years...
HALPERN: If we take that simple trust question, “Do you think other people can be trusted?” It’s a better predictor of national economic growth rates than levels of human capital."
Links - 28th December 2019 (1) (Star Wars Sequel Trilogy)
The New Star Wars trilogy is worse than the prequels - "What I miss is the daring. Nobody can say George didn't swing for the fences with the prequels. After all, the same experimentalism that gave us Binks and the "sand" dialogue also gave us the iconic Darth Maul duel, the best opening sequence in any Star Wars movie, and so much more... the character and plot arcs are so much more focused in Lucas' trilogies. In the prequels, Anakin's trek from gifted child-slave to Sith Lord, and Obi-Wan's growth from optimistic Padawan to tempered Jedi Master both work.By contrast, the new films drag characters to and fro, more concerned with self-consciously echoing or subverting character moments from the original trilogy (Rey sneaking around the Starkiller base and studying under an aging master, Kylo killing his father, beheading Snoke and asking Rey to "join me") than forcing them to confront truly challenging dilemmas (Qui-Gon Jinn ignoring the council to teach Anakin, Anakin avenging his mother)...
The effect of plot armor is that, over time, the whole movie begins to appear increasingly artificial: The audience doesn't feel the characters are at risk, and the characters never have to make difficult decisions, since the consequences don't truly matter.Celebrated writer Kurt Vonnegut put it simply in his advice to other writers: "Be a sadist." And George Lucas is -- in a good way. Anakin's master, Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed in The Phantom Menace, and Darth Maul, the coolest bad guy around, gets bisected. Anakin's mother gets tortured, and Anakin responds by killing every man, woman and child in a Tusken Raider encampment. Anakin loses limbs, Padmé dies in childbirth, and Jedis are exterminated (even the Younglings!).The prequel trilogy is a bloodbath, and that gives the movies real tension... The few meaningful deaths in the Disney trilogy feel intentionally parceled out for the maximum emotional heft: One of the original three cast members is killed off at the climax of each movie so far, and no-one of much substance gets offed besides...
Perhaps what everything boils down to is this: Like any studio, Disney fears losing money. Though I'm not privy to the inner workings of the studio, money seemed the clearest motivator for shutting down the Star Wars Anthology movies after Solo's poor returns. And it's likely why Solo was plagued with top-down micromanagement in the first place, including giving the ax to the talented directors to hire Ron Howard, a solidly paint-by-numbers studio director ever since A Beautiful Mind won the Oscar. Where George Lucas famously had an "If people don't like [my vision], they don't have to see it" mentality, Disney and Abrams seem to fear sullying a beloved franchise with precisely what made it beloved in the first place: experimentation and boundary-testing. Even Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which fans largely excoriated for tearing down Star Wars conventions, missed the point. Johnson fought to subvert Star Wars lore, not to make a particularly innovative movie. So many scenes felt fuller of winking references than crucial plot or character moments: His dialogue leaned more toward Joss Whedon's Marvel humor than Star Wars' tension-building (did a $250 million dollar production just begin with a three-minute lead-up to a "your mama" joke?) and his plot revelations felt more like manipulative twists achieved by withholding information from the audience and characters than opportunities for character development. Poe's ill-advised mutiny killed an untold number of innocents, for instance, but his decision stemmed from Vice Admiral Holdo's inexplicable opacity -- was the lesson really to blindly submit to Chain of Command?... Disney's cautiousness has led to good-but-never-great Star Wars movies. And that's why I will always take the bad dialogue and incredible moments of the prequels over a Star Wars trilogy that has neither."
Rian Johnson To Direct Mr. Rogers Sequel Where He's Just A Bitter Old Man Who Doesn't Believe In All That 'Be Kind To Your Neighbor' Crap Anymore | The Babylon Bee
Back to Jakku?-lyn on Twitter - "I loved The Last Jedi, a lot, it’s my favorite. But you can’t say it didn’t sideline its characters of color and devote the vast majority of the character development moments to the white characters. John says he wasn’t about that? I say you should fucking listen to him!!!"
???
Star Wars if it was made in 2019 (image of gender swapped Han Solo and Leia in bikini)
Star Wars: Disney May Have Removed Rose Tico From The Rise Of Skywalker Merchandise
Will ‘Star Wars’ Stick the Landing? J.J. Abrams Will Try - The New York Times - "J.J. Abrams knows what audiences think of him. “I’ve never been great at endings,” the filmmaker said just hours after delivering a finished version of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” With some hesitation, Abrams added, “I don’t actually think I’m good at anything, but I know how to begin a story. Ending a story is tough.”... Like the stories told within the films themselves, the story of this “Star Wars” film — which its creators and stars described in a series of interviews — is one in which inadvertent decisions lead to unintended consequences. It is a tale in which history repeats itself and destiny can be outrun for only so long before it must be confronted"
John Boyega Admits ‘The Last Jedi' Was ‘Iffy' and He ‘Didn't Agree With a Lot of the Choices' - "“‘The Force Awakens’ I think was the beginning of something quite solid, ‘The Last Jedi’ if I’m being honest I’d say that was feeling a bit iffy for me,” the actor said. “I didn’t necessarily agree with a lot of the choices in that and that’s something that spoke to Mark [Hamill] a lot about and we had conversations about it. And it was hard for all of us, because we were separated.”This only adds fuel to fire. Many hardcore Star Wars fans jumped off the bandwagon after “The Last Jedi,” but it’s not odd at all that Boyega would only now be criticizing the film now, two years later, especially since Disney’s been campaigning very hard to get back some of the fans they lost because of Rian Johnson’s 2017 film."
Disney Disturbs the Force: Pleasing Star Wars Fans Complicates Saga - WSJ - "While Disney wanted to sell millions of toys, fans could never sense that any character or plot point was conceived as a business decision, he said. Star Wars was different than any set of characters and story lines Disney had absorbed up until that point. Any whiff of marketing imperatives driving the creative decisions on the Star Wars franchise would immediately, in the eyes of devoted fans, cast Disney as the evil empire that had gobbled up their beloved modern-day myth.Navigating that danger zone has proved to be the most difficult part of absorbing the blockbuster series: How to bring aboard a new generation of moviegoers while avoiding turning off the die-hard fans that have an outsize voice in the success or failure of the films... worrying fissures have formed. The second episode of the new trilogy, the 2017 release “The Last Jedi,” collected 33% less at the domestic box office than “Force Awakens.” Spinoff film “Solo,” about the younger days of hero Han Solo, was poorly scheduled and underwhelmed audiences. Fans held off visiting the new theme park attraction while a promised second ride was behind schedule. (It opened in Florida this week and is expected to open in California in January.) A string of high-profile directors has been fired or left projects unexpectedly, and the creative plan for the films after the next release is unclear... Disney purchased an established cinematic world that came with disciples of the original movies, who attend conferences dressed in painstakingly accurate regalia and endlessly debate the minutiae of the mystically binding energy known as the Force and other lore. Only after the purchase did Disney begin to fathom how avid a fan base it had on its hands, according to a consultant Disney hired. Early buzz among die-hard fans can set the tone for a movie’s overall reception and dent or boost opening-weekend grosses. Studio executives across Hollywood scour early reactions on social media to trailers and promotions, assessing whether the responses mean changes should be made... Star Wars fans will happily shell out not only for movie tickets, but also for $20 Blu-rays, $84 Darth Vader gold rings, $32 Chewbacca kitchen aprons and $199 lightsabers at Galaxy’s Edge, among thousands of other items... “The Last Jedi” suffered a backlash after it seemed to contradict key elements of previous films, upsetting a legion of older fans who objected to what they felt were silly subplots and story decisions that dismissed or perverted a mythology they grew up with... “Solo” premiered as scheduled and mostly fizzled with fans. It collected $213 million domestically, the least of any Star Wars film. Consumers have bought fewer toys with every release, and attendance at the Star Wars theme-park attraction has fallen short of expectations set by analysts, who projected record-setting crowds... Rather than take the Marvel approach and begin filming the first movie with the end of the series in mind, Lucasfilm has largely determined the overarching plot from movie to movie, former employees say. That creates a clash since the multiple moving parts of the Disney franchise machine depend on schedules, forward planning and shared information. When a videogame division at Disney approached the Lucasfilm story group about a game that would take place in the time between “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi,” videogame developers were told the story group had no idea what was going to happen in “Last Jedi,” even though “Force Awakens” was close to wrapping production... While Mr. Johnson was shooting “Last Jedi,” an installment that took the series in unexpected directions, Lucasfilm executives had little idea how they would wrap up the trilogy in the film that followed... [There] has been a revolving door of directors hired to great public fanfare and fired when their narrative ambition edged too far outside guidelines, or it became clear they weren’t experienced enough to handle $200 million megaproductions. In just five years, half a dozen directors have been fired or left projects midfilming or ahead of future installments, and in the past several months Lucasfilm story architects who conceived of recent films have left... Star Wars is “political in a sense that it has a foundation in historical politics—the rise of dictatorships, the death of democracy—but it has never tried to take a stand on present-day issues,” said Howard Roffman, a former executive in charge of franchise management at Lucasfilm who joined the company in 1980 and left about two years ago. Now, though, some viewers “attribute contemporary motives to the content” of the new films... The story lines of both the current trilogy and the spinoff “Rogue One,” released in 2016, revolve around a heroine and have multiple, central female characters, a big shift from the original movies, in which Princess Leia was the only noteworthy female character... Vito Gesualdi, a Los Angeles-based graphic designer, produced a YouTube video titled “Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure,” which dissects what he sees as narrative missteps in the film. It has nearly eight million views, and Mr. Gesualdi said the ad revenue from his 20-minute diatribe (the movie “takes one of the most beloved franchises of all time, throws it into the trunk of a car and then backs it into a river”) earned him enough to pay more than a year’s rent."
Unfortunately the WSJ doesn't note that all the "misogynists" who hate strong female characters so much have no issue with Jyn
J.J. Abrams Questions Meta Approach in The Last Jedi - ""it's a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don't think that people go to 'Star Wars' to be told, 'This doesn't matter.'" His opinion here is very reminiscent of what some fans have been saying since the movie's release back in 2017. Abrams left an assortment of cliffhangers and unanswered questions, as he so often does as a lover of the 'mystery box' method of storytelling, and as each one was addressed in The Last Jedi it was simply batted away in ways that no one had really expected. Who are Rey's parents? Nobody. Who was Snoke? It doesn't matter. What will Luke's reaction be to being given his lightsaber back? Chuck it away unceremoniously. Abrams seems to be on the side of the fans who felt almost insulted by so many dismissals and subversions
I guess JJ is a misogynist manchild too
Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker: What went wrong with Disney trilogy? - "The Star Wars blame game has started.The final film in the new trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, hits cinemas next week — but it appears Disney insiders are already rushing to have their say on what went wrong... Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was asked about the difficulty in closing out the series, after J.J. Abrams was brought back in to replace Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow. “Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack,” she said. “There’s no source materia"... Die-hard Star Wars fans saw Ms Kennedy’s comments as a slap in the face. Prior to the release of The Force Awakens, Disney took a chainsaw to the so-called “Expanded Universe” — decades worth of novels, comic books, video games and cartoons — declaring the semi-official stories no longer “canon”."
Billy Dee Williams Talks Lando Calrissian and 'Rise of Skywalker' - "as early as 1981, he told Ebony magazine he was bored of “the question of race,” and these days, he hesitates to even identify as black... He loved that Lando Calrissian wasn’t written for any particular ethnicity. “I met with George Lucas, and he explained he had gotten flak about Darth Vader, the big dark figure, being a villain, and all he [had been] thinking was, a guy in a white hat, a guy in a black hat,” Williams says. “He wasn’t thinking racially. So when they gave me the script, I said, ‘This guy wears a cape? And Calrissian — what is it? Italian?’ I looked it up. Armenian! What an opportunity to move outside of the box.”... “To me, I’m Lando,” adds Williams, noting his respect for the actor who attempted the role in 2018’s Solo. “I love that Donald Glover. He’s a brilliant young man. But his hair was not how I thought of Lando. He was more Afrocentric with his hair. I have nothing against that. But when I created Lando, he was beyond all of that.” He was also perplexed by Solo’s suggestion that Lando was in love, maybe even lust, with a droid. “I think that’s the reason they didn’t have the success they could have had,” he says. “Because they were going for something that was topical, instead of an adventure that’s far beyond those questions. If you’re talking about this huge, incredible story, why lock yourself into this tiny moment between a character like Lando and his robot friend?”"
Making A STAR WARS Film Is Difficult Due To A Lack Of Comics And Novels Says Lucasfilm President - "most Star Wars fans would agree that they would have rather seen the Expanded Universe adapted for film instead of the tale that's unfolded so far in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. While it's possible that J.J. Abrams' The Rise of Skywalker could rectify a lot of the perceived missteps, the damage to the brand will remain and is a large factor in why Star Wars movies are going on hiatus, per Disney co-chairman Bob Iger... "Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be. We go through a really normal development process that everybody else does. You start by talking to filmmakers who you think exhibit the sensibilities that you’re looking for.""
Apparently no one else manages to produce movies not from comics or books.
Meme - "Prequel Fans When You Make Fun Of The Prequels *Anakin laughs*
Sequel Fans When You Make Fun Of The Sequels *Rey in agony*"
Vintage Star Wars toys on display - "While the value of various vintage Star Wars toys has been on the rise, the new products do not seem to be in such great demand any more.In February and August this year, Disney reported decreases in revenue from products based on the Star Wars franchise... "Everyone needs to collect something in his life," says Mr Koh, a father of three and owner of Flabslab, a firm that produces toys."I like to collect toys. My wife collects shoes and bags. The ultra-rich collect cars and houses. At the end of the day, it's about your passion.""
Strange, I thought the Last Jedi was a huge success
The Last Jedi Moment That Surprised J.J. Abrams the Most - "J.J. Abrams was surprised Rian Johnson chose to kill off a certain character in The Last Jedi. And no, it's probably not the one you're thinking of right now. Johnson made some pretty wild story choices that are either seen as bold by some Star Wars fans, or as bad choices by others. The director flipped the script and delivered a left turn, which was a sharp contrast to what Abrams did in 2015's The Force Awakens. The second installment in the sequel trilogy has a few deaths and one in particular stood out to Abrams... The death of Captain Phasma caught J.J. Abrams off-guard because he thought she was "one of those characters that I felt there was something else [for her to do]." Captain Phasma always seemed like she was destined to do more in the Star Wars universe
Subtle way of throwing shade
Bionic Woman Producer Kamran Pasha Uses Star Wars: The Last Jedi To Teach About Bad Screenwriting - "Bionic Woman and Kings producer Kamran Pasha, who also teaches screenwriting seminars, made it very clear he uses Star Wars: The Last Jedi to instruct his students on how not to write a screenplay.Pasha responded to a tweet from Wired staff producer Adam Lance Garcia, who pondered, “I have no idea how anyone can spend years being angry about a movie.”... One user responded that they are fascinated by The Last Jedi because every time they watch they find “more basic errors in screenwriting, editing, & plain script coherence seem to grow in number and severity.” They added, “It’s just a haemorrhage of how NOT to write a script.” That’s when Kamran Pasha weighed in. He stated, “I’ve done screenwriting seminars at Columbia, University of Chicago and other great schools. I always use STAR WARS to teach students how to write a screenplay. Now I add: “THE LAST JEDI will show you how to do it wrong.” This isn’t the first time Pasha has spoken out about the problems with The Last Jedi.Back in October he detailed that there are a number of Hollywood screenwriters who share his distaste for The Last Jedi. He even says most won’t speak about it in public “for fear of Disney.” He has also described the film as “emotionally dead.”"
Of course, these are all misogynist manbabies who don't know anything
It'sAlmost ️Christmas on Twitter - "Women Have Long Taken a Back Seat in #StarWars, But #TheLastJedi Finally Puts Them First
"Princess Leia literally set the whole plot in motion, ran around shooting dudes with a blaster, and stood toe-to-toe with Darth Vader. Fuck off with this shit."
Star Wars Actor John Boyega Apologizes After He's Accused of Calling Kelly Marie Tran Weak - "Through social media, we get to engage, we get to have fun. But at the same time, for those who are not mentally strong, you are weak to believe in every single thing that you read."
Apparently it's a bad thing to not believe every single thing that you read, and be able to ignore haters, and everyone should delete their social media even if they can do this
Ezra Cubero on Twitter - "#FilmTwitter After The Last Jedi: "Stop bullying Rian Johnson because he didn't make the movie you wanted.
#FilmTwitter After The Rise of Skywalker: "JJ Abrams how fucking dare you.""
Fred Roberts on Twitter - "@patrickhwillems "but everyone should just remember, this is a film about space wizards intended for children. I'm not saying you shouldn't take it seriously just maybe... don't get too angry about it"
"JJ Abrams how fucking dare you" - Patrickhwillems""
Burds ARE Real - Posts - "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Audience Score: 88%
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Tomatometer: 57%
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Audience Score: 43%
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Tomatometer: 91%"
Sounds like you should do the opposite of what the critics say
The Critics Must Be Crazy: ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is The Best ‘Star Wars’ Movie In The New Trilogy - ""Let the hate flow through you.”... The phrase may as well be the tag-line to various swaths of Star Wars fans at any given time. There seems to be a dedicated “fandom” in the Star Wars galaxy right now that simply relishes hating on anything and everything Star Wars.For the latest film, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker, that group apparently includes the critics. Film reviewers are tearing the movie apart for a whole variety of reasons, and while there’s no accounting for taste, many of the reasons given simply don’t stand up to scrutiny... It feels like only yesterday I was writing a similar piece about Netflix’s The Witcher (it was in fact three days ago). Critics panned that show as well, albeit for different reasons... Detractors of The Last Jedi are gleeful over Rise because they see it as a renunciation of Johnson’s Star Wars. Critics who loved The Last Jedi seem to think the same thing. I liked many things about The Last Jedi and soured on many others since I first saw it, but I think Abrams did a really good job at both giving the fans more of what they wanted and respecting what The Last Jedi did to change the Star Wars universe. The Last Jedi setup Rey’s dark past perfectly, showing how drawn she was to the Dark Side while training with Luke. And while it fumbled the entire space chase sequence and casino planet, all the Luke/Rey and Kylo/Rey stuff was on point and fits perfectly with the final reveal of her true identity and the way everything plays out with Kylo Ren and Palpatine... The argument also relies on something very strange: The idea that giving fans the movie they want is somehow a bad thing. Familiarity, nostalgia—these become bad words in many critiques of the movie, as though fans should only ever have their expectations subverted. A little subversion goes a long way—we don’t need to abandon everything that makes Star Wars what it is in order to appease critics. It’s a strange debate. After all, one could say that Johnson undermined Abrams to begin with, dashing all he had planned with The Force Awakens into little tiny plot fragments... While I’m by no means a huge detractor of The Last Jedi I find myself never rewatching the film. After seeing it in theaters, once the initial glow had faded, I realized something: I didn’t want to go see it again. It was too long. Too much of the film plodded along. The stuff I really liked only composed maybe half the movie and the rest felt like wasted space. The Rise Of Skywalker, on the other hand, has me itching for more... Isn’t it odd that critics seem to claim that The Last Jedi both subverted everything about Star Wars and encapsulated everything about Star Wars that makes it great? If familiarity and nostalgia are bad, what exactly does make Star Wars Star Wars?... I would argue that Star Wars has always been about repeating forms. Anyone who complains that there are too many similarities between the new films and the original trilogy must have missed how this same storytelling device was used in the prequel trilogies... It’s almost as if critics are taking Episode IX personally, as though giving fans the kind of Star Wars happy ending they wanted is a rebuke of The Last Jedi’s more subversive tone... Is it fair to review a movie by comparing it the previous entry in the series? By this I mean, if The Last Jedi had been a very different film, would these critiques be the same? If the second entry in this trilogy had maintained the tone and ideas of The Force Awakens instead of subverting expectations, would critics be making these arguments or would they be judging this movie on its own merits?... It feels like many of these reviewers just dislike what makes a Star Wars movie a Star Wars movie in the first place... If you don’t like movies about prophecies, chosen ones, the hero’s journey and surprise revelations about who’s related to who, why are you watching Star Wars to begin with?... let’s also be realistic here: Rose was not an important character and The Last Jedi did very little to make her one. I’m not sure what she would have added to a story that’s really about the characters established in The Force Awakens... I still maintain that you can enjoy what The Last Jedi did with Luke and his anger and feelings of resentment and his struggle to cope with his own failures and even his flirtation with striking down Kylo Ren because he’s always been rash and impulsive (like his father) while still enjoying the fact that Force Ghost Luke has found peace, has finally been able to lift his X-Wing out of the water, and catches the lightsaber instead of tossing it over his back. Far from a dig at The Last Jedi, that moment—to me at least—spoke to Luke’s continued evolution and arc... And no, this isn’t Rey’s movie, it’s Rey and Kylo Ren’s movie. Strangely enough, that was also the case with The Last Jedi. Why one is lauded here and the other panned is beyond me... Of the three, I think Rise of Skywalker is the best, but would have been better if they didn’t have to shoehorn quite so much in at the last minute"
Faint praise, given the other 2. But while mediocre, at least it is original without seeking to subvert conventions of being a good movie
He makes a good point that JJ kept what worked from TLJ
Lucas said it was like poetry - it rhymes. But rhyming isn't the same as plagiarism
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker’s Backlash Is The Opposite Of Last Jedi - "Prior to the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, everything looked good for the middle chapter in Disney's sequel trilogy, and the eighth installment of the Skywalker saga overall. Rian Johnson had already been given the keys to a new Star Wars trilogy, the trailers had been well-received, and most of all the early reviews for The Last Jedi were overwhelmingly positive. And then audiences saw it, and things took a major turn... Star Wars is rarely so unpopular with critics - only The Phantom Menace has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score"
Presumably movies should only be made for the critics (and the critics alone), as they're the ones who pay the bills
The Rise of Skywalker review: The new Star Wars movie undoes what made The Last Jedi great. - "as the outcry from The Last Jedi’s detractors grew, Johnson has sounded less certain about his place on Lucasfilm’s call sheet, and J.J. Abrams, who launched the current trilogy and was brought back to close it out, used the first interviews on The Rise of Skywalker’s press tour to signal to the haters that they had been heard: “I don’t think that people go to Star Wars to be told ‘This doesn’t matter’”... The haste with which The Rise of Skywalker rushes to undo its predecessor is almost comical at first, at least before its capitulation to the franchise’s most toxic fans turns outright contemptible. Mad that Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) didn’t spend enough time together in the last movie? Let’s shove them into the same frame from the beginning and throw in lots of forced banter to remind you that they’re pals... Leia’s scenes, written around whatever snippets of dialogue existed or could be cobbled together, have the clunky feel of found-audio collages... It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal... It’s of a piece with the pointedly unambitious The Mandalorian, just good enough to get people’s attention but fundamentally terrified of rocking the boat"
Strange how Disney decided to pander to this "small but extremely vocal minority". Maybe they know something the critics don't
Odd how having your putative main characters onscreen together and interacting is a bad thing
Presumably to spite "toxic" fans TROS should've doubled down and ruined the franchise further
It's telling the author doesn't like The Mandalorian either
The Rise Of Skywalker walks back The Last Jedi's best decisions - "In the press blitz surrounding The Rise Of Skywalker, the stars and creators of the final film in the latest Star Wars trilogy started tossing out weird statements that could only be read as veiled criticism of The Last Jedi... Daisy Ridley said she cried with relief at hearing Abrams was returning... Abrams went ahead and did what a small but extremely vocal minority of Star Wars fandom wanted to do but couldn’t: He walked back the most compelling elements of The Last Jedi... The conclusion of this trilogy jettisons much of the work done by Johnson’s film—to the point where, for all intents and purposes, The Rise Of Skywalker could almost pick up where The Force Awakens left off... Abrams’ kowtowing to noisy fanboys seems most blatant in the marginalization of Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico, introduced as a major new character in The Last Jedi, yet now relegated to a barely-there role on the sidelines, à la Jar Jar Binks; it’s hard not to read it as a sop to the worst of the Star Wars audience"
Presumably the stars and creators of TROS are toxic fans and misogynistic manchildren too
Given that Ruin shat over everything TFA set up, it's only fitting JJ returned the favour and ignored TLJ
Maybe JJ just thought Tran wasn't a very good actress. Or that the movie was already rushed enough as it is to have to waste time pandering to SJWs by featuring her prominently
Star Wars 8: Rian Johnson THREW OUT JJ Abrams entire Last Jedi outline says Daisy Ridley
The Rise of Skywalker Wastes Its Best (and Newest) Characters - "Star Wars has always been about legacies so establishing Rey as part of an important lineage is all well and good, but how could Episode IX fail to flesh out the son of the Emperor? The franchise has explored Vader's children, Luke and Leia, and Leia and Han's son, Ben/Kylo Ren, so delving into Palpatine's son would have completed an amazing trifecta and provided a peek on the other side of the curtain. There could even have been some sort of connection between the Emperor's son and Luke as the offspring of tyrants who chose not to follow the Dark Side."
Apparently it isn't rushed enough already as it is
Rey's new yellow lightsaber has a hidden meaning in 'Rise of Skywalker' - "it is brilliant storytelling that Rey would transform her quarterstaff — a tool that represents her lifelong survival — into her own holy weapon"
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Ending Explained (& What Happens Next) - " The blade acts as a symbol of balance between both sides (it's muted from the Jedi blue and Sith red), suggesting that Rey is the embodiment of balance in the Force. This is the ending that feels most intended from the beginning of the sequel trilogy: deserted scavenger Rey claiming the Skywalker name not through blood but by actions, an active rebuke of lineage as the cause of greatness and emboldening of any individual's character
Yellow comes from red and green...
Star Wars: Rey's New Lightsaber In Rise of Skywalker Explained - "There's also a symbolic relevance to Rey burying the Skywalker sabers. The Rise of Skywalker is billed as the closing chapter of the famous family's saga in the Star Wars universe, and laying to rest the weapons that belonged to Luke and Leia is a major step towards achieving that goal, since the Skywalker saga couldn't truly be over if Rey was still carrying the lightsaber synonymous with that name. This resolution is somewhat undermined when Rey opts to call herself a Skywalker, but the visual of the sabers literally being put into the ground still acts as a powerful image to close out Luke, Anakin and Leia's story... For her entire run in the sequel trilogy, Rey has been defined by her upbringing, or lack of it, and a quest to uncover her identity. After bounding from "no one" to a Palpatine to a Skywalker, it's a fitting end that Rey ultimately chooses a lightsaber design that is worlds away from those that came before in The Rise of Skywalker"
6 Ways The Rise of Skywalker Undoes The Last Jedi - "There is very little evidence of other Force users beyond Rey and Kylo, with the lone exception being Finn. While the film still suggests they are out there, there is almost nothing to build off the incredible promise of the final shot of The Last Jedi...
While Rose was a divisive character in the last film, many loved Kelly Marie Tran's performance and were disheartened to fins she only has a handful of short scenes and is all but dismissed by her friend/love interest Finn...
While assessing their attack against Palpatine, someone suggests a similar maneuver to the one Admiral Holdo used in the last film of a kamikaze light speed attack. This is dismissed as a one-time-thing that couldn't be repeated."
It's amazing how many "critics" didn't watch the prequels and are unaware of current Disney Canon, to be able to claim that the Force isn't democratised
Then again "democratised" seems to be code for "able to use force powers with no training", which ironically would explain why Rey is such a Mary Sue in The Force Awakens
I would want to distant myself from someone who sexually assaulted me too
Ironically, when defending the Holdo manouevre, fans of The Last Jedi need to explain how it's a one-time-thing that can't be repeated. Which makes sense given how disruptive it was to the Star Wars Universe (for the sake of an admittedly visually impressive sequence)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Ending Explained (& What Happens Next) - "Rey Palpatine is only part of the story. In a twist on the Skywalker saga's usual focus on family, it's not about bloodline. The final battle at the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is one both large and small. It is Rey vs. Palpatine, but it's also a showdown between all of the Jedi and all of the Sith, a grand confrontation that aims to balance the Force itself."
Star Wars: All The Ways Rise of Skywalker Completely Retcons Last Jedi - "Being passed down from Anakin to Luke, the classic Skywalker lightsaber became Rey's in the sequel trilogy. The weapon called out to the scavenger on Takodana and chose her over Kylo Ren on Starkiller base. Rey then used it throughout The Last Jedi, be it in training on Ahch-To or battling the praetorian guards alongside Kylo. Lucasfilm even went so far as to rebrand it "Rey's lightsaber" for merchandising purposes, so The Rise of Skywalker features an odd plot point with regard to the saber.Early on in the film, Rey is going through a training exercise, but doesn't complete it because she's distracted. Going back to her new master Leia, Rey hands the Resistance general the lightsaber and says one day she'll be worthy of Luke's lightsaber. That doesn't really line up with the previous films, establishing an arc where Rey takes complete ownership of the weapon. She had it in the previous two movies, and this wasn't an issue."
Since The Last Jedi's fans like not being tied to the past so much, they presumably approve of this
Disney's Star Wars Sequels Disrespected Darth Vader Most Of All - "The original trilogy was undeniably a story about Luke Skywalker, but after the prequels came along and expanded Anakin Skywalker's backstory, the trilogy was reframed as a part of Anakin's rise and fall, forming a complete six-episode story. Unfortunately, the addition of the sequels don't expand the Skywalker saga in the same way and totally undo Vader's legacy."
The Rise of Skywalker Makes Rian Johnson's Star Wars Trilogy Less Likely - "If Lucasfilm was willing to allow Abrams to undo some of Johnson's more notable creative choices, it would appear as if the studio has no real intention of welcoming Johnson back to add to Star Wars canon."
The Rise of Skywalker and the decline of Star Wars - "Kennedy gave complete control of writing and directing the second sequel to Rian Johnson, an indie-movie and television director. He had never written or directed a franchise sequel... Johnson took an aggressive approach to fan criticism. In interviews and on social media, he described fans critical of the film as ‘manbabies’ and ‘unhealthy’. Many colleagues joined him in abusing and taunting fans. And many fans announced that they would never spend money on Star Wars films again.Still, the claim that these fans were just bigots went unchallenged. Actress Kelly Marie Tran withdrew from social media after The Last Jedi’s release. Numerous articles stated (without providing evidence) that this was in response to sexist and racist abuse. Mainstream media called this an outbreak of ‘toxic fandom’. And the more criticism was portrayed as racism and sexism, the more antagonising fans seemed justifiable.Core fans rejected these distortions. They formed a loose alliance called ‘The Fandom Menace’, a nod to the title of the first prequel. Their concerns and complaints were voiced on YouTube channels such as ‘Geeks and Gamers’, ‘World Class Bullshitters’, ‘Nerdrotic’, ‘Overlord DVD’, ‘ComicArtistsPro Secrets’ and ‘Thor Skywalker’. Websites such as ‘Disney Star Wars is Dumb’ were formed and alternative-media sites such as ‘Bleeding Fool’ and ‘Bounding Into Comics’ took up the side of dissident fans.Anger at The Last Jedi, and how its makers had handled that criticism, led The Fandom Menace to call for a boycott of the 2018 spin-off movie Solo. The film flopped, largely owing to escalating costs due to extensive reshoots. But it still served as a bit of a wake-up call for Disney to do better by their fans. Disney commissioned a standalone television series, The Mandalorian, which premiered last month. It has already gone some distance to restoring faith in the franchise among fans, telling the story of a bounty hunter. Its makers eschewed politics and flashy set pieces, and it was seen as a ‘solid’ series. Responses – so far – suggest enthusiasts are particularly happy that there was no progressive agenda attached to the series... Abrams’ screenwriting limitations seem to have surfaced again.There have been rumours of early test screenings going catastrophically wrong, with viewers even walking out. A desperate Lucasfilm arranged multiple cuts to solve problems. They even invited George Lucas back to work on the film. The revised versions required extensive reshoots that continued into October – less than two months before release.Script leaks were met with incredulity. Many of the early reviews have been poor. The jumbled episodic structure, resurrection of dead characters, and revision of in-universe lore look likely to make The Rise of Skywalker a massive let-down for long-time fans seeking consistency and answers to story questions. The modular approach to editing and reshooting shows that Abrams and Kennedy had no idea how to use characters or fix plot problems"
Dank Star Wars Memes Cantina - Original Trilogy: "Leia: Leader
Chewbacca: Mechanic
C3-P0: Knowledge
Luke: Knight
Han: Ace Pilot"
Sequel Trilogy: "Poe: I'll just sit at the back
Chewbacca: Chauffeur
Finn: Comic Relief
Rey: Leader, Mechanic, Knight, Ace Pilot, Knowledge"
Disney's "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" Shows the Force Has Weakened - "The $175.5 million domestic opening weekend for Disney's (NYSE:DIS) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is both one of the best-ever bows for a December picture and a staggering step down for the mainline franchise. Despite delivering the third-best opening weekend for any December film, the picture will likely go down as a disappointment for The House of Mouse... Star Wars is declining... Declining ticket sales for the sequel trilogy's concluding installment adds another concerning data point for the property's trajectory. The Star Wars fan base appears to be divided on what they want from the series, merchandise sales have declined sharply over the last four years, and Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park attractions have gotten off to a weaker-than-expected start. Some industry watchers have attributed recent disappoints to "Star Wars fatigue," with waning interest stemming from Disney releasing too many movies in the franchise too soon... The Marvel Cinematic Universe saw three releases in 2019 alone, each of which proved very successful. The tremendous success for the streaming television series The Mandalorian on Disney+ also confounds the idea that audiences have universally grown tired of Star Wars. It seems more likely that many fans lost interest in the world of the sequel trilogy because they were unimpressed with the quality of the output, and this spilled over into merchandise and theme park performance... Dissatisfaction and controversy surrounding The Last Jedi was likely a significant factor in the Solo spin-off grossing just $393 million at the box office -- a figure so shockingly low that it prompted Disney to narrow its ambitions for the franchise and cancel or delay a number of in-development Star Wars projects. While Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe has benefited from a meticulously plotted franchise plan, it seems that kind of structure was never in place for the company's take on the galaxy far, far away.The Force Awakens delivered a tremendous performance in 2015 and was laden with the mystery-driven approach to storytelling that director J.J. Abrams is known for. Comments from Star Wars cast and production members suggest that Last Jedi director Rian Johnson wrote most of the script for his film prior to The Force Awakens being completed, and it did away with many of its predecessors' thematic and narrative threads. The change in direction seems to have been divisive for audiences -- and internally at Lucasfilm. Director Colin Trevorrow was originally signed to direct Episode IX but departed from the project due to creative differences related to dissatisfaction with plot choices in The Last Jedi."
Trevorrow must be a misogynist too!
Addendum:
JTE on Twitter - "Man... John Boyega deserves better than just repeatedly screaming “REY!” in every movie. A great actor wasted in a trilogy because it had no plan."
The effect of plot armor is that, over time, the whole movie begins to appear increasingly artificial: The audience doesn't feel the characters are at risk, and the characters never have to make difficult decisions, since the consequences don't truly matter.Celebrated writer Kurt Vonnegut put it simply in his advice to other writers: "Be a sadist." And George Lucas is -- in a good way. Anakin's master, Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed in The Phantom Menace, and Darth Maul, the coolest bad guy around, gets bisected. Anakin's mother gets tortured, and Anakin responds by killing every man, woman and child in a Tusken Raider encampment. Anakin loses limbs, Padmé dies in childbirth, and Jedis are exterminated (even the Younglings!).The prequel trilogy is a bloodbath, and that gives the movies real tension... The few meaningful deaths in the Disney trilogy feel intentionally parceled out for the maximum emotional heft: One of the original three cast members is killed off at the climax of each movie so far, and no-one of much substance gets offed besides...
Perhaps what everything boils down to is this: Like any studio, Disney fears losing money. Though I'm not privy to the inner workings of the studio, money seemed the clearest motivator for shutting down the Star Wars Anthology movies after Solo's poor returns. And it's likely why Solo was plagued with top-down micromanagement in the first place, including giving the ax to the talented directors to hire Ron Howard, a solidly paint-by-numbers studio director ever since A Beautiful Mind won the Oscar. Where George Lucas famously had an "If people don't like [my vision], they don't have to see it" mentality, Disney and Abrams seem to fear sullying a beloved franchise with precisely what made it beloved in the first place: experimentation and boundary-testing. Even Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which fans largely excoriated for tearing down Star Wars conventions, missed the point. Johnson fought to subvert Star Wars lore, not to make a particularly innovative movie. So many scenes felt fuller of winking references than crucial plot or character moments: His dialogue leaned more toward Joss Whedon's Marvel humor than Star Wars' tension-building (did a $250 million dollar production just begin with a three-minute lead-up to a "your mama" joke?) and his plot revelations felt more like manipulative twists achieved by withholding information from the audience and characters than opportunities for character development. Poe's ill-advised mutiny killed an untold number of innocents, for instance, but his decision stemmed from Vice Admiral Holdo's inexplicable opacity -- was the lesson really to blindly submit to Chain of Command?... Disney's cautiousness has led to good-but-never-great Star Wars movies. And that's why I will always take the bad dialogue and incredible moments of the prequels over a Star Wars trilogy that has neither."
Rian Johnson To Direct Mr. Rogers Sequel Where He's Just A Bitter Old Man Who Doesn't Believe In All That 'Be Kind To Your Neighbor' Crap Anymore | The Babylon Bee
Back to Jakku?-lyn on Twitter - "I loved The Last Jedi, a lot, it’s my favorite. But you can’t say it didn’t sideline its characters of color and devote the vast majority of the character development moments to the white characters. John says he wasn’t about that? I say you should fucking listen to him!!!"
???
Star Wars if it was made in 2019 (image of gender swapped Han Solo and Leia in bikini)
Star Wars: Disney May Have Removed Rose Tico From The Rise Of Skywalker Merchandise
Will ‘Star Wars’ Stick the Landing? J.J. Abrams Will Try - The New York Times - "J.J. Abrams knows what audiences think of him. “I’ve never been great at endings,” the filmmaker said just hours after delivering a finished version of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” With some hesitation, Abrams added, “I don’t actually think I’m good at anything, but I know how to begin a story. Ending a story is tough.”... Like the stories told within the films themselves, the story of this “Star Wars” film — which its creators and stars described in a series of interviews — is one in which inadvertent decisions lead to unintended consequences. It is a tale in which history repeats itself and destiny can be outrun for only so long before it must be confronted"
John Boyega Admits ‘The Last Jedi' Was ‘Iffy' and He ‘Didn't Agree With a Lot of the Choices' - "“‘The Force Awakens’ I think was the beginning of something quite solid, ‘The Last Jedi’ if I’m being honest I’d say that was feeling a bit iffy for me,” the actor said. “I didn’t necessarily agree with a lot of the choices in that and that’s something that spoke to Mark [Hamill] a lot about and we had conversations about it. And it was hard for all of us, because we were separated.”This only adds fuel to fire. Many hardcore Star Wars fans jumped off the bandwagon after “The Last Jedi,” but it’s not odd at all that Boyega would only now be criticizing the film now, two years later, especially since Disney’s been campaigning very hard to get back some of the fans they lost because of Rian Johnson’s 2017 film."
Disney Disturbs the Force: Pleasing Star Wars Fans Complicates Saga - WSJ - "While Disney wanted to sell millions of toys, fans could never sense that any character or plot point was conceived as a business decision, he said. Star Wars was different than any set of characters and story lines Disney had absorbed up until that point. Any whiff of marketing imperatives driving the creative decisions on the Star Wars franchise would immediately, in the eyes of devoted fans, cast Disney as the evil empire that had gobbled up their beloved modern-day myth.Navigating that danger zone has proved to be the most difficult part of absorbing the blockbuster series: How to bring aboard a new generation of moviegoers while avoiding turning off the die-hard fans that have an outsize voice in the success or failure of the films... worrying fissures have formed. The second episode of the new trilogy, the 2017 release “The Last Jedi,” collected 33% less at the domestic box office than “Force Awakens.” Spinoff film “Solo,” about the younger days of hero Han Solo, was poorly scheduled and underwhelmed audiences. Fans held off visiting the new theme park attraction while a promised second ride was behind schedule. (It opened in Florida this week and is expected to open in California in January.) A string of high-profile directors has been fired or left projects unexpectedly, and the creative plan for the films after the next release is unclear... Disney purchased an established cinematic world that came with disciples of the original movies, who attend conferences dressed in painstakingly accurate regalia and endlessly debate the minutiae of the mystically binding energy known as the Force and other lore. Only after the purchase did Disney begin to fathom how avid a fan base it had on its hands, according to a consultant Disney hired. Early buzz among die-hard fans can set the tone for a movie’s overall reception and dent or boost opening-weekend grosses. Studio executives across Hollywood scour early reactions on social media to trailers and promotions, assessing whether the responses mean changes should be made... Star Wars fans will happily shell out not only for movie tickets, but also for $20 Blu-rays, $84 Darth Vader gold rings, $32 Chewbacca kitchen aprons and $199 lightsabers at Galaxy’s Edge, among thousands of other items... “The Last Jedi” suffered a backlash after it seemed to contradict key elements of previous films, upsetting a legion of older fans who objected to what they felt were silly subplots and story decisions that dismissed or perverted a mythology they grew up with... “Solo” premiered as scheduled and mostly fizzled with fans. It collected $213 million domestically, the least of any Star Wars film. Consumers have bought fewer toys with every release, and attendance at the Star Wars theme-park attraction has fallen short of expectations set by analysts, who projected record-setting crowds... Rather than take the Marvel approach and begin filming the first movie with the end of the series in mind, Lucasfilm has largely determined the overarching plot from movie to movie, former employees say. That creates a clash since the multiple moving parts of the Disney franchise machine depend on schedules, forward planning and shared information. When a videogame division at Disney approached the Lucasfilm story group about a game that would take place in the time between “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi,” videogame developers were told the story group had no idea what was going to happen in “Last Jedi,” even though “Force Awakens” was close to wrapping production... While Mr. Johnson was shooting “Last Jedi,” an installment that took the series in unexpected directions, Lucasfilm executives had little idea how they would wrap up the trilogy in the film that followed... [There] has been a revolving door of directors hired to great public fanfare and fired when their narrative ambition edged too far outside guidelines, or it became clear they weren’t experienced enough to handle $200 million megaproductions. In just five years, half a dozen directors have been fired or left projects midfilming or ahead of future installments, and in the past several months Lucasfilm story architects who conceived of recent films have left... Star Wars is “political in a sense that it has a foundation in historical politics—the rise of dictatorships, the death of democracy—but it has never tried to take a stand on present-day issues,” said Howard Roffman, a former executive in charge of franchise management at Lucasfilm who joined the company in 1980 and left about two years ago. Now, though, some viewers “attribute contemporary motives to the content” of the new films... The story lines of both the current trilogy and the spinoff “Rogue One,” released in 2016, revolve around a heroine and have multiple, central female characters, a big shift from the original movies, in which Princess Leia was the only noteworthy female character... Vito Gesualdi, a Los Angeles-based graphic designer, produced a YouTube video titled “Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure,” which dissects what he sees as narrative missteps in the film. It has nearly eight million views, and Mr. Gesualdi said the ad revenue from his 20-minute diatribe (the movie “takes one of the most beloved franchises of all time, throws it into the trunk of a car and then backs it into a river”) earned him enough to pay more than a year’s rent."
Unfortunately the WSJ doesn't note that all the "misogynists" who hate strong female characters so much have no issue with Jyn
J.J. Abrams Questions Meta Approach in The Last Jedi - ""it's a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don't think that people go to 'Star Wars' to be told, 'This doesn't matter.'" His opinion here is very reminiscent of what some fans have been saying since the movie's release back in 2017. Abrams left an assortment of cliffhangers and unanswered questions, as he so often does as a lover of the 'mystery box' method of storytelling, and as each one was addressed in The Last Jedi it was simply batted away in ways that no one had really expected. Who are Rey's parents? Nobody. Who was Snoke? It doesn't matter. What will Luke's reaction be to being given his lightsaber back? Chuck it away unceremoniously. Abrams seems to be on the side of the fans who felt almost insulted by so many dismissals and subversions
I guess JJ is a misogynist manchild too
Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker: What went wrong with Disney trilogy? - "The Star Wars blame game has started.The final film in the new trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, hits cinemas next week — but it appears Disney insiders are already rushing to have their say on what went wrong... Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was asked about the difficulty in closing out the series, after J.J. Abrams was brought back in to replace Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow. “Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack,” she said. “There’s no source materia"... Die-hard Star Wars fans saw Ms Kennedy’s comments as a slap in the face. Prior to the release of The Force Awakens, Disney took a chainsaw to the so-called “Expanded Universe” — decades worth of novels, comic books, video games and cartoons — declaring the semi-official stories no longer “canon”."
Billy Dee Williams Talks Lando Calrissian and 'Rise of Skywalker' - "as early as 1981, he told Ebony magazine he was bored of “the question of race,” and these days, he hesitates to even identify as black... He loved that Lando Calrissian wasn’t written for any particular ethnicity. “I met with George Lucas, and he explained he had gotten flak about Darth Vader, the big dark figure, being a villain, and all he [had been] thinking was, a guy in a white hat, a guy in a black hat,” Williams says. “He wasn’t thinking racially. So when they gave me the script, I said, ‘This guy wears a cape? And Calrissian — what is it? Italian?’ I looked it up. Armenian! What an opportunity to move outside of the box.”... “To me, I’m Lando,” adds Williams, noting his respect for the actor who attempted the role in 2018’s Solo. “I love that Donald Glover. He’s a brilliant young man. But his hair was not how I thought of Lando. He was more Afrocentric with his hair. I have nothing against that. But when I created Lando, he was beyond all of that.” He was also perplexed by Solo’s suggestion that Lando was in love, maybe even lust, with a droid. “I think that’s the reason they didn’t have the success they could have had,” he says. “Because they were going for something that was topical, instead of an adventure that’s far beyond those questions. If you’re talking about this huge, incredible story, why lock yourself into this tiny moment between a character like Lando and his robot friend?”"
Making A STAR WARS Film Is Difficult Due To A Lack Of Comics And Novels Says Lucasfilm President - "most Star Wars fans would agree that they would have rather seen the Expanded Universe adapted for film instead of the tale that's unfolded so far in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. While it's possible that J.J. Abrams' The Rise of Skywalker could rectify a lot of the perceived missteps, the damage to the brand will remain and is a large factor in why Star Wars movies are going on hiatus, per Disney co-chairman Bob Iger... "Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be. We go through a really normal development process that everybody else does. You start by talking to filmmakers who you think exhibit the sensibilities that you’re looking for.""
Apparently no one else manages to produce movies not from comics or books.
Meme - "Prequel Fans When You Make Fun Of The Prequels *Anakin laughs*
Sequel Fans When You Make Fun Of The Sequels *Rey in agony*"
Vintage Star Wars toys on display - "While the value of various vintage Star Wars toys has been on the rise, the new products do not seem to be in such great demand any more.In February and August this year, Disney reported decreases in revenue from products based on the Star Wars franchise... "Everyone needs to collect something in his life," says Mr Koh, a father of three and owner of Flabslab, a firm that produces toys."I like to collect toys. My wife collects shoes and bags. The ultra-rich collect cars and houses. At the end of the day, it's about your passion.""
Strange, I thought the Last Jedi was a huge success
The Last Jedi Moment That Surprised J.J. Abrams the Most - "J.J. Abrams was surprised Rian Johnson chose to kill off a certain character in The Last Jedi. And no, it's probably not the one you're thinking of right now. Johnson made some pretty wild story choices that are either seen as bold by some Star Wars fans, or as bad choices by others. The director flipped the script and delivered a left turn, which was a sharp contrast to what Abrams did in 2015's The Force Awakens. The second installment in the sequel trilogy has a few deaths and one in particular stood out to Abrams... The death of Captain Phasma caught J.J. Abrams off-guard because he thought she was "one of those characters that I felt there was something else [for her to do]." Captain Phasma always seemed like she was destined to do more in the Star Wars universe
Subtle way of throwing shade
Bionic Woman Producer Kamran Pasha Uses Star Wars: The Last Jedi To Teach About Bad Screenwriting - "Bionic Woman and Kings producer Kamran Pasha, who also teaches screenwriting seminars, made it very clear he uses Star Wars: The Last Jedi to instruct his students on how not to write a screenplay.Pasha responded to a tweet from Wired staff producer Adam Lance Garcia, who pondered, “I have no idea how anyone can spend years being angry about a movie.”... One user responded that they are fascinated by The Last Jedi because every time they watch they find “more basic errors in screenwriting, editing, & plain script coherence seem to grow in number and severity.” They added, “It’s just a haemorrhage of how NOT to write a script.” That’s when Kamran Pasha weighed in. He stated, “I’ve done screenwriting seminars at Columbia, University of Chicago and other great schools. I always use STAR WARS to teach students how to write a screenplay. Now I add: “THE LAST JEDI will show you how to do it wrong.” This isn’t the first time Pasha has spoken out about the problems with The Last Jedi.Back in October he detailed that there are a number of Hollywood screenwriters who share his distaste for The Last Jedi. He even says most won’t speak about it in public “for fear of Disney.” He has also described the film as “emotionally dead.”"
Of course, these are all misogynist manbabies who don't know anything
It'sAlmost ️Christmas on Twitter - "Women Have Long Taken a Back Seat in #StarWars, But #TheLastJedi Finally Puts Them First
"Princess Leia literally set the whole plot in motion, ran around shooting dudes with a blaster, and stood toe-to-toe with Darth Vader. Fuck off with this shit."
Star Wars Actor John Boyega Apologizes After He's Accused of Calling Kelly Marie Tran Weak - "Through social media, we get to engage, we get to have fun. But at the same time, for those who are not mentally strong, you are weak to believe in every single thing that you read."
Apparently it's a bad thing to not believe every single thing that you read, and be able to ignore haters, and everyone should delete their social media even if they can do this
Ezra Cubero on Twitter - "#FilmTwitter After The Last Jedi: "Stop bullying Rian Johnson because he didn't make the movie you wanted.
#FilmTwitter After The Rise of Skywalker: "JJ Abrams how fucking dare you.""
Fred Roberts on Twitter - "@patrickhwillems "but everyone should just remember, this is a film about space wizards intended for children. I'm not saying you shouldn't take it seriously just maybe... don't get too angry about it"
"JJ Abrams how fucking dare you" - Patrickhwillems""
Burds ARE Real - Posts - "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Audience Score: 88%
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Tomatometer: 57%
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Audience Score: 43%
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Tomatometer: 91%"
Sounds like you should do the opposite of what the critics say
The Critics Must Be Crazy: ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is The Best ‘Star Wars’ Movie In The New Trilogy - ""Let the hate flow through you.”... The phrase may as well be the tag-line to various swaths of Star Wars fans at any given time. There seems to be a dedicated “fandom” in the Star Wars galaxy right now that simply relishes hating on anything and everything Star Wars.For the latest film, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker, that group apparently includes the critics. Film reviewers are tearing the movie apart for a whole variety of reasons, and while there’s no accounting for taste, many of the reasons given simply don’t stand up to scrutiny... It feels like only yesterday I was writing a similar piece about Netflix’s The Witcher (it was in fact three days ago). Critics panned that show as well, albeit for different reasons... Detractors of The Last Jedi are gleeful over Rise because they see it as a renunciation of Johnson’s Star Wars. Critics who loved The Last Jedi seem to think the same thing. I liked many things about The Last Jedi and soured on many others since I first saw it, but I think Abrams did a really good job at both giving the fans more of what they wanted and respecting what The Last Jedi did to change the Star Wars universe. The Last Jedi setup Rey’s dark past perfectly, showing how drawn she was to the Dark Side while training with Luke. And while it fumbled the entire space chase sequence and casino planet, all the Luke/Rey and Kylo/Rey stuff was on point and fits perfectly with the final reveal of her true identity and the way everything plays out with Kylo Ren and Palpatine... The argument also relies on something very strange: The idea that giving fans the movie they want is somehow a bad thing. Familiarity, nostalgia—these become bad words in many critiques of the movie, as though fans should only ever have their expectations subverted. A little subversion goes a long way—we don’t need to abandon everything that makes Star Wars what it is in order to appease critics. It’s a strange debate. After all, one could say that Johnson undermined Abrams to begin with, dashing all he had planned with The Force Awakens into little tiny plot fragments... While I’m by no means a huge detractor of The Last Jedi I find myself never rewatching the film. After seeing it in theaters, once the initial glow had faded, I realized something: I didn’t want to go see it again. It was too long. Too much of the film plodded along. The stuff I really liked only composed maybe half the movie and the rest felt like wasted space. The Rise Of Skywalker, on the other hand, has me itching for more... Isn’t it odd that critics seem to claim that The Last Jedi both subverted everything about Star Wars and encapsulated everything about Star Wars that makes it great? If familiarity and nostalgia are bad, what exactly does make Star Wars Star Wars?... I would argue that Star Wars has always been about repeating forms. Anyone who complains that there are too many similarities between the new films and the original trilogy must have missed how this same storytelling device was used in the prequel trilogies... It’s almost as if critics are taking Episode IX personally, as though giving fans the kind of Star Wars happy ending they wanted is a rebuke of The Last Jedi’s more subversive tone... Is it fair to review a movie by comparing it the previous entry in the series? By this I mean, if The Last Jedi had been a very different film, would these critiques be the same? If the second entry in this trilogy had maintained the tone and ideas of The Force Awakens instead of subverting expectations, would critics be making these arguments or would they be judging this movie on its own merits?... It feels like many of these reviewers just dislike what makes a Star Wars movie a Star Wars movie in the first place... If you don’t like movies about prophecies, chosen ones, the hero’s journey and surprise revelations about who’s related to who, why are you watching Star Wars to begin with?... let’s also be realistic here: Rose was not an important character and The Last Jedi did very little to make her one. I’m not sure what she would have added to a story that’s really about the characters established in The Force Awakens... I still maintain that you can enjoy what The Last Jedi did with Luke and his anger and feelings of resentment and his struggle to cope with his own failures and even his flirtation with striking down Kylo Ren because he’s always been rash and impulsive (like his father) while still enjoying the fact that Force Ghost Luke has found peace, has finally been able to lift his X-Wing out of the water, and catches the lightsaber instead of tossing it over his back. Far from a dig at The Last Jedi, that moment—to me at least—spoke to Luke’s continued evolution and arc... And no, this isn’t Rey’s movie, it’s Rey and Kylo Ren’s movie. Strangely enough, that was also the case with The Last Jedi. Why one is lauded here and the other panned is beyond me... Of the three, I think Rise of Skywalker is the best, but would have been better if they didn’t have to shoehorn quite so much in at the last minute"
Faint praise, given the other 2. But while mediocre, at least it is original without seeking to subvert conventions of being a good movie
He makes a good point that JJ kept what worked from TLJ
Lucas said it was like poetry - it rhymes. But rhyming isn't the same as plagiarism
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker’s Backlash Is The Opposite Of Last Jedi - "Prior to the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, everything looked good for the middle chapter in Disney's sequel trilogy, and the eighth installment of the Skywalker saga overall. Rian Johnson had already been given the keys to a new Star Wars trilogy, the trailers had been well-received, and most of all the early reviews for The Last Jedi were overwhelmingly positive. And then audiences saw it, and things took a major turn... Star Wars is rarely so unpopular with critics - only The Phantom Menace has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score"
Presumably movies should only be made for the critics (and the critics alone), as they're the ones who pay the bills
The Rise of Skywalker review: The new Star Wars movie undoes what made The Last Jedi great. - "as the outcry from The Last Jedi’s detractors grew, Johnson has sounded less certain about his place on Lucasfilm’s call sheet, and J.J. Abrams, who launched the current trilogy and was brought back to close it out, used the first interviews on The Rise of Skywalker’s press tour to signal to the haters that they had been heard: “I don’t think that people go to Star Wars to be told ‘This doesn’t matter’”... The haste with which The Rise of Skywalker rushes to undo its predecessor is almost comical at first, at least before its capitulation to the franchise’s most toxic fans turns outright contemptible. Mad that Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) didn’t spend enough time together in the last movie? Let’s shove them into the same frame from the beginning and throw in lots of forced banter to remind you that they’re pals... Leia’s scenes, written around whatever snippets of dialogue existed or could be cobbled together, have the clunky feel of found-audio collages... It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal... It’s of a piece with the pointedly unambitious The Mandalorian, just good enough to get people’s attention but fundamentally terrified of rocking the boat"
Strange how Disney decided to pander to this "small but extremely vocal minority". Maybe they know something the critics don't
Odd how having your putative main characters onscreen together and interacting is a bad thing
Presumably to spite "toxic" fans TROS should've doubled down and ruined the franchise further
It's telling the author doesn't like The Mandalorian either
The Rise Of Skywalker walks back The Last Jedi's best decisions - "In the press blitz surrounding The Rise Of Skywalker, the stars and creators of the final film in the latest Star Wars trilogy started tossing out weird statements that could only be read as veiled criticism of The Last Jedi... Daisy Ridley said she cried with relief at hearing Abrams was returning... Abrams went ahead and did what a small but extremely vocal minority of Star Wars fandom wanted to do but couldn’t: He walked back the most compelling elements of The Last Jedi... The conclusion of this trilogy jettisons much of the work done by Johnson’s film—to the point where, for all intents and purposes, The Rise Of Skywalker could almost pick up where The Force Awakens left off... Abrams’ kowtowing to noisy fanboys seems most blatant in the marginalization of Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico, introduced as a major new character in The Last Jedi, yet now relegated to a barely-there role on the sidelines, à la Jar Jar Binks; it’s hard not to read it as a sop to the worst of the Star Wars audience"
Presumably the stars and creators of TROS are toxic fans and misogynistic manchildren too
Given that Ruin shat over everything TFA set up, it's only fitting JJ returned the favour and ignored TLJ
Maybe JJ just thought Tran wasn't a very good actress. Or that the movie was already rushed enough as it is to have to waste time pandering to SJWs by featuring her prominently
Star Wars 8: Rian Johnson THREW OUT JJ Abrams entire Last Jedi outline says Daisy Ridley
The Rise of Skywalker Wastes Its Best (and Newest) Characters - "Star Wars has always been about legacies so establishing Rey as part of an important lineage is all well and good, but how could Episode IX fail to flesh out the son of the Emperor? The franchise has explored Vader's children, Luke and Leia, and Leia and Han's son, Ben/Kylo Ren, so delving into Palpatine's son would have completed an amazing trifecta and provided a peek on the other side of the curtain. There could even have been some sort of connection between the Emperor's son and Luke as the offspring of tyrants who chose not to follow the Dark Side."
Apparently it isn't rushed enough already as it is
Rey's new yellow lightsaber has a hidden meaning in 'Rise of Skywalker' - "it is brilliant storytelling that Rey would transform her quarterstaff — a tool that represents her lifelong survival — into her own holy weapon"
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Ending Explained (& What Happens Next) - " The blade acts as a symbol of balance between both sides (it's muted from the Jedi blue and Sith red), suggesting that Rey is the embodiment of balance in the Force. This is the ending that feels most intended from the beginning of the sequel trilogy: deserted scavenger Rey claiming the Skywalker name not through blood but by actions, an active rebuke of lineage as the cause of greatness and emboldening of any individual's character
Yellow comes from red and green...
Star Wars: Rey's New Lightsaber In Rise of Skywalker Explained - "There's also a symbolic relevance to Rey burying the Skywalker sabers. The Rise of Skywalker is billed as the closing chapter of the famous family's saga in the Star Wars universe, and laying to rest the weapons that belonged to Luke and Leia is a major step towards achieving that goal, since the Skywalker saga couldn't truly be over if Rey was still carrying the lightsaber synonymous with that name. This resolution is somewhat undermined when Rey opts to call herself a Skywalker, but the visual of the sabers literally being put into the ground still acts as a powerful image to close out Luke, Anakin and Leia's story... For her entire run in the sequel trilogy, Rey has been defined by her upbringing, or lack of it, and a quest to uncover her identity. After bounding from "no one" to a Palpatine to a Skywalker, it's a fitting end that Rey ultimately chooses a lightsaber design that is worlds away from those that came before in The Rise of Skywalker"
6 Ways The Rise of Skywalker Undoes The Last Jedi - "There is very little evidence of other Force users beyond Rey and Kylo, with the lone exception being Finn. While the film still suggests they are out there, there is almost nothing to build off the incredible promise of the final shot of The Last Jedi...
While Rose was a divisive character in the last film, many loved Kelly Marie Tran's performance and were disheartened to fins she only has a handful of short scenes and is all but dismissed by her friend/love interest Finn...
While assessing their attack against Palpatine, someone suggests a similar maneuver to the one Admiral Holdo used in the last film of a kamikaze light speed attack. This is dismissed as a one-time-thing that couldn't be repeated."
It's amazing how many "critics" didn't watch the prequels and are unaware of current Disney Canon, to be able to claim that the Force isn't democratised
Then again "democratised" seems to be code for "able to use force powers with no training", which ironically would explain why Rey is such a Mary Sue in The Force Awakens
I would want to distant myself from someone who sexually assaulted me too
Ironically, when defending the Holdo manouevre, fans of The Last Jedi need to explain how it's a one-time-thing that can't be repeated. Which makes sense given how disruptive it was to the Star Wars Universe (for the sake of an admittedly visually impressive sequence)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Ending Explained (& What Happens Next) - "Rey Palpatine is only part of the story. In a twist on the Skywalker saga's usual focus on family, it's not about bloodline. The final battle at the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is one both large and small. It is Rey vs. Palpatine, but it's also a showdown between all of the Jedi and all of the Sith, a grand confrontation that aims to balance the Force itself."
Star Wars: All The Ways Rise of Skywalker Completely Retcons Last Jedi - "Being passed down from Anakin to Luke, the classic Skywalker lightsaber became Rey's in the sequel trilogy. The weapon called out to the scavenger on Takodana and chose her over Kylo Ren on Starkiller base. Rey then used it throughout The Last Jedi, be it in training on Ahch-To or battling the praetorian guards alongside Kylo. Lucasfilm even went so far as to rebrand it "Rey's lightsaber" for merchandising purposes, so The Rise of Skywalker features an odd plot point with regard to the saber.Early on in the film, Rey is going through a training exercise, but doesn't complete it because she's distracted. Going back to her new master Leia, Rey hands the Resistance general the lightsaber and says one day she'll be worthy of Luke's lightsaber. That doesn't really line up with the previous films, establishing an arc where Rey takes complete ownership of the weapon. She had it in the previous two movies, and this wasn't an issue."
Since The Last Jedi's fans like not being tied to the past so much, they presumably approve of this
Disney's Star Wars Sequels Disrespected Darth Vader Most Of All - "The original trilogy was undeniably a story about Luke Skywalker, but after the prequels came along and expanded Anakin Skywalker's backstory, the trilogy was reframed as a part of Anakin's rise and fall, forming a complete six-episode story. Unfortunately, the addition of the sequels don't expand the Skywalker saga in the same way and totally undo Vader's legacy."
The Rise of Skywalker Makes Rian Johnson's Star Wars Trilogy Less Likely - "If Lucasfilm was willing to allow Abrams to undo some of Johnson's more notable creative choices, it would appear as if the studio has no real intention of welcoming Johnson back to add to Star Wars canon."
The Rise of Skywalker and the decline of Star Wars - "Kennedy gave complete control of writing and directing the second sequel to Rian Johnson, an indie-movie and television director. He had never written or directed a franchise sequel... Johnson took an aggressive approach to fan criticism. In interviews and on social media, he described fans critical of the film as ‘manbabies’ and ‘unhealthy’. Many colleagues joined him in abusing and taunting fans. And many fans announced that they would never spend money on Star Wars films again.Still, the claim that these fans were just bigots went unchallenged. Actress Kelly Marie Tran withdrew from social media after The Last Jedi’s release. Numerous articles stated (without providing evidence) that this was in response to sexist and racist abuse. Mainstream media called this an outbreak of ‘toxic fandom’. And the more criticism was portrayed as racism and sexism, the more antagonising fans seemed justifiable.Core fans rejected these distortions. They formed a loose alliance called ‘The Fandom Menace’, a nod to the title of the first prequel. Their concerns and complaints were voiced on YouTube channels such as ‘Geeks and Gamers’, ‘World Class Bullshitters’, ‘Nerdrotic’, ‘Overlord DVD’, ‘ComicArtistsPro Secrets’ and ‘Thor Skywalker’. Websites such as ‘Disney Star Wars is Dumb’ were formed and alternative-media sites such as ‘Bleeding Fool’ and ‘Bounding Into Comics’ took up the side of dissident fans.Anger at The Last Jedi, and how its makers had handled that criticism, led The Fandom Menace to call for a boycott of the 2018 spin-off movie Solo. The film flopped, largely owing to escalating costs due to extensive reshoots. But it still served as a bit of a wake-up call for Disney to do better by their fans. Disney commissioned a standalone television series, The Mandalorian, which premiered last month. It has already gone some distance to restoring faith in the franchise among fans, telling the story of a bounty hunter. Its makers eschewed politics and flashy set pieces, and it was seen as a ‘solid’ series. Responses – so far – suggest enthusiasts are particularly happy that there was no progressive agenda attached to the series... Abrams’ screenwriting limitations seem to have surfaced again.There have been rumours of early test screenings going catastrophically wrong, with viewers even walking out. A desperate Lucasfilm arranged multiple cuts to solve problems. They even invited George Lucas back to work on the film. The revised versions required extensive reshoots that continued into October – less than two months before release.Script leaks were met with incredulity. Many of the early reviews have been poor. The jumbled episodic structure, resurrection of dead characters, and revision of in-universe lore look likely to make The Rise of Skywalker a massive let-down for long-time fans seeking consistency and answers to story questions. The modular approach to editing and reshooting shows that Abrams and Kennedy had no idea how to use characters or fix plot problems"
Dank Star Wars Memes Cantina - Original Trilogy: "Leia: Leader
Chewbacca: Mechanic
C3-P0: Knowledge
Luke: Knight
Han: Ace Pilot"
Sequel Trilogy: "Poe: I'll just sit at the back
Chewbacca: Chauffeur
Finn: Comic Relief
Rey: Leader, Mechanic, Knight, Ace Pilot, Knowledge"
Disney's "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" Shows the Force Has Weakened - "The $175.5 million domestic opening weekend for Disney's (NYSE:DIS) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is both one of the best-ever bows for a December picture and a staggering step down for the mainline franchise. Despite delivering the third-best opening weekend for any December film, the picture will likely go down as a disappointment for The House of Mouse... Star Wars is declining... Declining ticket sales for the sequel trilogy's concluding installment adds another concerning data point for the property's trajectory. The Star Wars fan base appears to be divided on what they want from the series, merchandise sales have declined sharply over the last four years, and Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park attractions have gotten off to a weaker-than-expected start. Some industry watchers have attributed recent disappoints to "Star Wars fatigue," with waning interest stemming from Disney releasing too many movies in the franchise too soon... The Marvel Cinematic Universe saw three releases in 2019 alone, each of which proved very successful. The tremendous success for the streaming television series The Mandalorian on Disney+ also confounds the idea that audiences have universally grown tired of Star Wars. It seems more likely that many fans lost interest in the world of the sequel trilogy because they were unimpressed with the quality of the output, and this spilled over into merchandise and theme park performance... Dissatisfaction and controversy surrounding The Last Jedi was likely a significant factor in the Solo spin-off grossing just $393 million at the box office -- a figure so shockingly low that it prompted Disney to narrow its ambitions for the franchise and cancel or delay a number of in-development Star Wars projects. While Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe has benefited from a meticulously plotted franchise plan, it seems that kind of structure was never in place for the company's take on the galaxy far, far away.The Force Awakens delivered a tremendous performance in 2015 and was laden with the mystery-driven approach to storytelling that director J.J. Abrams is known for. Comments from Star Wars cast and production members suggest that Last Jedi director Rian Johnson wrote most of the script for his film prior to The Force Awakens being completed, and it did away with many of its predecessors' thematic and narrative threads. The change in direction seems to have been divisive for audiences -- and internally at Lucasfilm. Director Colin Trevorrow was originally signed to direct Episode IX but departed from the project due to creative differences related to dissatisfaction with plot choices in The Last Jedi."
Trevorrow must be a misogynist too!
Addendum:
JTE on Twitter - "Man... John Boyega deserves better than just repeatedly screaming “REY!” in every movie. A great actor wasted in a trilogy because it had no plan."
Friday, December 27, 2019
Links - 27th December 2019 (2) (Trans Mania)
University of Queensland academics sign open letter after law dean's trans comments - "Almost 40 law academics at the University of Queensland have signed an open letter pledging to support transgender students after the university’s law school dean presented a paper that compared transgender children to teens with eating disorders... “This paper has endeavoured to show just how many of the ideas strongly promulgated by some in the transgender movement are based upon unscientific beliefs, or otherwise beliefs and values that science can neither validate nor disprove. “Gender theory has emerged from the humanities, not the sciences.”... The UQ law society has also issued a statement, saying Parkinson’s comments “are not reflective of the inclusive culture fostered amongst law students”... “The [law society] rejects the sentiment expressed and recognises that these statements do not reflect the lived experiences of transgender people, as well as those transitioning or who identify as gender fluid or non-binary.”... “None of my colleagues have raised any concerns with me, and none have asked for a copy of the 14,000-word paper that I delivered last week. Had they done so, they would have found that it deals with issues that are being widely discussed in the medical and scientific literature.“My background is in child protection. To suggest that we don’t tackle difficult issues because it might be challenging is to avoid the responsibilities of intellectual leadership.”"
Precisely. Lived Experience comes from the humanities, not the sciences
How the Trans-Rights Movement Is Turning Philosophers Into Activists - "the three claimed to have been the victims of “non-consensual co-platforming”—which meant being put on the same internet page as us. Yet as philosopher Dan Kaufman pointed out in a recent blog post, “there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited.” Dembroff, Kukla and Stryker also claimed that our views constituted “acts of violence,” and suggested that entering into debate with us might be analogized to engaging with the question of “whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others.” The extravagance of this rhetorical gambit should be shocking to philosophers and laypeople alike—especially insofar as it grotesquely co-opts such apocalyptic horrors as the extermination of Europe’s Jews and the African slave trade as a means to discredit a philosophical and political position on the nature of sex and gender. It is hard to imagine that the authors’ use of “corrective rape” being “used to cure lesbianism” was anything other than a grotesque barb hurled at me, Stock, Bindel—all three of us being lesbians. The Institute’s staff were decent enough to let me respond. My main points were that debate over gender is a reasonable—as opposed to unreasonable—disagreement, no matter how badly the trans-activist side behaves, and that those on that side should “at least leave the rape talk out of it.”
In the past year, I’ve asked many of my colleagues across philosophy whether they can recall a time where things were so heated over a philosophical issue. Abortion? No. Euthanasia? No. Animal rights? Not really, no. Some can come up with specific anecdotes, like the 1946 confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in which Wittgenstein apparently brandished a fireplace poker to make his points, and after the argument grew heated, threw down the poker and stormed out of the room (all documented in David Edmonds & John Eidinow’s popular book, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers). But if a single incident such as that can fill one book, there may well be many books to be written about philosophy’s gender wars by the time today’s embers cool to ash... 'transwomen are women and transmen are men'. Some think it’s perfectly fine to take this as a starting assumption. Some even treat delivering this result as a baseline condition of adequacy for theory in this area—which relegates philosophy to the mere service of explicitly political goals... The foundational commitment of philosophy, my field, is the pursuit of truth... One of the worst norm violations is letting feelings creep in. We teach our students that the ideal philosophical discussion is dispassionate. Others can’t be expected to share your feelings. You have to do the hard work of providing them reasons and arguments. Given these longstanding values, and the disciplinary norms built up to protect them, it is alarming to observe the emergence of a group of activists within the profession who are attempting to assert that there can be no debate when it comes to the question of gender identity...
How did things get to the point that some professional academic philosophers felt they had to de-platform themselves just to avoid appearing on the same web page as other professional academic philosophers? Since when did analytic philosophers, normally sticklers for precise language, describe views they don’t like as “violence”?... British philosopher John Broome thinks that almost all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our actions do harm to the world. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University disagrees. It’s a very serious subject. Yet you don’t see Broome calling Sinnott-Armstrong a “cunt” on social media (as Rebecca Kukla has done to me)...
The point of the discussion, as the establishment feminist philosophers see it, isn’t to determine the truth of the underlying claims, but to provide succour to a vulnerable community. They are doing politics and calling it philosophy."
Philosophers should not be sanctioned for their positions on sex and gender (opinion) - "The proposed measures, such as censuring philosophers who defend these controversial positions or preventing those positions from being advanced at professional conferences and in scholarly journals, violate the fundamental academic commitment to free inquiry. Moreover, the consequent narrowing of discussion would set a dangerous precedent, threatening the ability of philosophers to engage with the issues of the day. We acknowledge that philosophical arguments can lead to pain, anxiety and frustration when they challenge deeply held commitments -- whether pertaining to gender identity, religious conviction, political ideology or the rights and moral status of fetuses or nonhuman animals"
The trans squad keep obsessing about "trans phobia" in philosophy. Maybe because philosophers are especially resistant to gaslighting
Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia - Scientific American Blog Network - "Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary"
"Scientific" American strikes again
Nicholas Morano - "This [Scientific American] piece cites research showing overlap between men's and women's testosterone levels. Following the link, I am blocked by a paywall, which I must bypass by logging into my academic institution. The cited study was not an actual report on an experiment, but a series of claims made and citations listed (ex. given below.) Following the citation to the scientific study claimed to provide evidence for overlapping levels of testosterone found between men and women, I found serious misrepresentations of the conclusions reached in the study. The study is an investigation into various problems possibly confounding results of salivary testosterone measurements. Far from claiming that there is no significant difference between mens' and womens' testosterone levels, the study mentions several ways in which testosterone levels differ between men and women. For instance, salivary testosterone levels are far less stable (more within-subject variation) for boys than for girls. (exs. given below). No mention is made of significant overlap between levels of men and women. This detail was contrived, and can't be located in the actual report"
Feminist Julia Beck Testifies against Equality Act - "Julia Beck testified against the Equality Act (H.R. 5) before the House Judiciary Committee. Beck is a lesbian who was booted out of the Baltimore LGBT Commission for describing a male transgender rapist as a male and saying that men can’t be lesbians...
'male rapists will go to women’s prisons and likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the U.K.; female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters; men will dominate women’s sports — girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity; women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social media platforms; girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed-space toilets; girls and women will no longer have a right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse; female security officers will no longer have the right to refuse to perform pat-downs or intimate searches of males who say they’re female and women undergoing security checks will no longer have the right to refuse having those security checks being performed by men claiming a feminine identity.'
She pointed out that “everything I just listed is already happening, and it’s only going to get worse if gender identity is recognized in federal law.” And added, “I urge my fellow Democrats to wake up. Please acknowledge biological reality.”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts -
"However, even without that recent evidence, the biological principles for separation into men’s and women’s categories in sport are so strong that to overturn it requires exceptional evidence (2/)"
"Are you a biologist? Are you a scientist? Have you got a PhD? Published a paper in a peer reviewed journal? If not then STFU."
"Yes, yes, yes and yes."
"Athletic organizations and governments are still wrestling with the issue of how to incorporate transgender and intersectional athletes into their programs.After attending a conference, Dr. Ross Tucker tweeted that even lowering testosterone does not remove all the advantages for an athlete who grew up with male-levels of testosterone. This has an impact on policy as some sports organizations base participation on recent testosterone levels.As you can see below, an activist who objected to this opinion decided to counter Tucker with a ‘call to authority’ fallacy. It didn’t go well for her. She has since locked her Twitter account as the exchange has spread across the internet."
smartercoachingllc on Twitter "@Scienceofsport Not being cheeky, but how do we define "male" and "female"? If a person has a Y chromosome at all is that person a male? It would have been easier (less inclusive) if sports officials had started with XX and XY and not allowed anyone else to play. Easier, but maybe not fair."
"Simple question, complex answer. Biological sex is now recognised to be the result of 5, maybe 6 characteristics. DSDs (intersex cases) occur when not all 6 line up. Trans MTF are where all 6 DO line up, as male or female, and the person identifies as something different. So, in case of MTF trans athletes, you have 6 out of 6 biological factors are male - chromosomes (XY), gonads (testes), hormones (high T), primary sex organs/genitalia (penis, internal genitalia male), secondary sex characterises, virilization male. Not too complex in trans issue"
So much for biological sex being a myth
Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues - "A significant majority of transgender and gender-variant students experience mental health issues, a new report shows. That statistic is greatly higher than for the general population.
Of course the trans interpretation is that discrimination causes the mental health issues rather than mental health issues causing gender identification issues
Blaire White on Twitter - "Trans: I'm trans
Society: k
Trans: Here are my pronouns
Society: k
Trans people: WAX MY BALLS & GIVE HORMONES TO KIDS OR YOUR'E A BIGOT
Society: Ok that's a little too fa-
Trans: FUCK YOU FASCIST
Society: Okay fuck it then I give up
Trans: Omg why does everyone hate me"
In 10 years, we'll ask how we allowed the trans lobby to hijack childhood - "the government is consulting on whether to allow people to change gender without medical diagnoses. And none of it is about love or support, but fear: a fear so potent it’s driving otherwise sane and educated adults to betray a generation of vulnerable children. Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett, a psychologist who works with children in schools across London, goes so far as to call it “state-sanctioned child abuse”. When I ask whether it can really be true that children could be sent off to consult with gender clinics without the parents’ knowledge, she explains that, currently, “the confidentiality of a trans child actually trumps everything, including a parent’s right to know. And if a school believes a child is mature enough to understand the implications of what they’re doing, they don’t need parental consent.”Added to this, “if a child comes to school and tells the teachers ‘my parents are anti-trans’, the school can call in social services and treat it as a safeguarding concern under emotional abuse. Theoretically, the child could even be taken away.”"
Parents remove son from school in pupil gender row - "The parents of a six-year-old boy have removed him from his primary school in a row over whether another pupil should be allowed to wear a dress.Nigel and Sally Rowe said their son was confused as to why the child at the Church of England School on the Isle of Wight dressed as both a boy and a girl.The Diocese of Portsmouth, under which the school falls, said it was required to "respect diversity of all kinds"... The couple said under the school's bullying policy their son faced being disciplined for misidentifying the gender of the six-year-old pupil... the couple were being accused of "transphobic behaviour" because of their "refusal to acknowledge a transgender person's true gender".Mr Rowe said: "I am shocked by the suggestion, especially from a church school, that just because we question the notion that a six-year-old boy can really become a girl, we are transphobic""
Social justice is important but let's not lose our fucking minds - Posts - "it's transphobic for trans people to want surgery and/or hormones because their desires are based in cissexist ideas of bodies... if it's transphobic to consider body parts feminine than transitioning and altering ur body is transphobic"
Canadian Cancer Society Uses Transgender Woman On Cervical Cancer Page - "Sadly, this isn’t the first time cervical cancer and trans women have been linked together.Virtue signaling, being woke, or whatever you want to call it have taken a lengthy detour into the absurd.It goes without saying that those born male don’t have cervices, but, in the UK, there was chatter about offering male-to-female transgender patients smear tests–on the taxpayer’s dime. Despite not being anatomically equipped to qualify for the procedure, giving these individuals the procedure is to supposedly provide a confidence boost."
Precisely. Lived Experience comes from the humanities, not the sciences
How the Trans-Rights Movement Is Turning Philosophers Into Activists - "the three claimed to have been the victims of “non-consensual co-platforming”—which meant being put on the same internet page as us. Yet as philosopher Dan Kaufman pointed out in a recent blog post, “there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited.” Dembroff, Kukla and Stryker also claimed that our views constituted “acts of violence,” and suggested that entering into debate with us might be analogized to engaging with the question of “whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others.” The extravagance of this rhetorical gambit should be shocking to philosophers and laypeople alike—especially insofar as it grotesquely co-opts such apocalyptic horrors as the extermination of Europe’s Jews and the African slave trade as a means to discredit a philosophical and political position on the nature of sex and gender. It is hard to imagine that the authors’ use of “corrective rape” being “used to cure lesbianism” was anything other than a grotesque barb hurled at me, Stock, Bindel—all three of us being lesbians. The Institute’s staff were decent enough to let me respond. My main points were that debate over gender is a reasonable—as opposed to unreasonable—disagreement, no matter how badly the trans-activist side behaves, and that those on that side should “at least leave the rape talk out of it.”
In the past year, I’ve asked many of my colleagues across philosophy whether they can recall a time where things were so heated over a philosophical issue. Abortion? No. Euthanasia? No. Animal rights? Not really, no. Some can come up with specific anecdotes, like the 1946 confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in which Wittgenstein apparently brandished a fireplace poker to make his points, and after the argument grew heated, threw down the poker and stormed out of the room (all documented in David Edmonds & John Eidinow’s popular book, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers). But if a single incident such as that can fill one book, there may well be many books to be written about philosophy’s gender wars by the time today’s embers cool to ash... 'transwomen are women and transmen are men'. Some think it’s perfectly fine to take this as a starting assumption. Some even treat delivering this result as a baseline condition of adequacy for theory in this area—which relegates philosophy to the mere service of explicitly political goals... The foundational commitment of philosophy, my field, is the pursuit of truth... One of the worst norm violations is letting feelings creep in. We teach our students that the ideal philosophical discussion is dispassionate. Others can’t be expected to share your feelings. You have to do the hard work of providing them reasons and arguments. Given these longstanding values, and the disciplinary norms built up to protect them, it is alarming to observe the emergence of a group of activists within the profession who are attempting to assert that there can be no debate when it comes to the question of gender identity...
How did things get to the point that some professional academic philosophers felt they had to de-platform themselves just to avoid appearing on the same web page as other professional academic philosophers? Since when did analytic philosophers, normally sticklers for precise language, describe views they don’t like as “violence”?... British philosopher John Broome thinks that almost all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our actions do harm to the world. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University disagrees. It’s a very serious subject. Yet you don’t see Broome calling Sinnott-Armstrong a “cunt” on social media (as Rebecca Kukla has done to me)...
The point of the discussion, as the establishment feminist philosophers see it, isn’t to determine the truth of the underlying claims, but to provide succour to a vulnerable community. They are doing politics and calling it philosophy."
Philosophers should not be sanctioned for their positions on sex and gender (opinion) - "The proposed measures, such as censuring philosophers who defend these controversial positions or preventing those positions from being advanced at professional conferences and in scholarly journals, violate the fundamental academic commitment to free inquiry. Moreover, the consequent narrowing of discussion would set a dangerous precedent, threatening the ability of philosophers to engage with the issues of the day. We acknowledge that philosophical arguments can lead to pain, anxiety and frustration when they challenge deeply held commitments -- whether pertaining to gender identity, religious conviction, political ideology or the rights and moral status of fetuses or nonhuman animals"
The trans squad keep obsessing about "trans phobia" in philosophy. Maybe because philosophers are especially resistant to gaslighting
Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia - Scientific American Blog Network - "Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary"
"Scientific" American strikes again
Nicholas Morano - "This [Scientific American] piece cites research showing overlap between men's and women's testosterone levels. Following the link, I am blocked by a paywall, which I must bypass by logging into my academic institution. The cited study was not an actual report on an experiment, but a series of claims made and citations listed (ex. given below.) Following the citation to the scientific study claimed to provide evidence for overlapping levels of testosterone found between men and women, I found serious misrepresentations of the conclusions reached in the study. The study is an investigation into various problems possibly confounding results of salivary testosterone measurements. Far from claiming that there is no significant difference between mens' and womens' testosterone levels, the study mentions several ways in which testosterone levels differ between men and women. For instance, salivary testosterone levels are far less stable (more within-subject variation) for boys than for girls. (exs. given below). No mention is made of significant overlap between levels of men and women. This detail was contrived, and can't be located in the actual report"
Feminist Julia Beck Testifies against Equality Act - "Julia Beck testified against the Equality Act (H.R. 5) before the House Judiciary Committee. Beck is a lesbian who was booted out of the Baltimore LGBT Commission for describing a male transgender rapist as a male and saying that men can’t be lesbians...
'male rapists will go to women’s prisons and likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the U.K.; female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters; men will dominate women’s sports — girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity; women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social media platforms; girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed-space toilets; girls and women will no longer have a right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse; female security officers will no longer have the right to refuse to perform pat-downs or intimate searches of males who say they’re female and women undergoing security checks will no longer have the right to refuse having those security checks being performed by men claiming a feminine identity.'
She pointed out that “everything I just listed is already happening, and it’s only going to get worse if gender identity is recognized in federal law.” And added, “I urge my fellow Democrats to wake up. Please acknowledge biological reality.”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts -
"However, even without that recent evidence, the biological principles for separation into men’s and women’s categories in sport are so strong that to overturn it requires exceptional evidence (2/)"
"Are you a biologist? Are you a scientist? Have you got a PhD? Published a paper in a peer reviewed journal? If not then STFU."
"Yes, yes, yes and yes."
"Athletic organizations and governments are still wrestling with the issue of how to incorporate transgender and intersectional athletes into their programs.After attending a conference, Dr. Ross Tucker tweeted that even lowering testosterone does not remove all the advantages for an athlete who grew up with male-levels of testosterone. This has an impact on policy as some sports organizations base participation on recent testosterone levels.As you can see below, an activist who objected to this opinion decided to counter Tucker with a ‘call to authority’ fallacy. It didn’t go well for her. She has since locked her Twitter account as the exchange has spread across the internet."
smartercoachingllc on Twitter "@Scienceofsport Not being cheeky, but how do we define "male" and "female"? If a person has a Y chromosome at all is that person a male? It would have been easier (less inclusive) if sports officials had started with XX and XY and not allowed anyone else to play. Easier, but maybe not fair."
"Simple question, complex answer. Biological sex is now recognised to be the result of 5, maybe 6 characteristics. DSDs (intersex cases) occur when not all 6 line up. Trans MTF are where all 6 DO line up, as male or female, and the person identifies as something different. So, in case of MTF trans athletes, you have 6 out of 6 biological factors are male - chromosomes (XY), gonads (testes), hormones (high T), primary sex organs/genitalia (penis, internal genitalia male), secondary sex characterises, virilization male. Not too complex in trans issue"
So much for biological sex being a myth
Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues - "A significant majority of transgender and gender-variant students experience mental health issues, a new report shows. That statistic is greatly higher than for the general population.
Of course the trans interpretation is that discrimination causes the mental health issues rather than mental health issues causing gender identification issues
Blaire White on Twitter - "Trans: I'm trans
Society: k
Trans: Here are my pronouns
Society: k
Trans people: WAX MY BALLS & GIVE HORMONES TO KIDS OR YOUR'E A BIGOT
Society: Ok that's a little too fa-
Trans: FUCK YOU FASCIST
Society: Okay fuck it then I give up
Trans: Omg why does everyone hate me"
In 10 years, we'll ask how we allowed the trans lobby to hijack childhood - "the government is consulting on whether to allow people to change gender without medical diagnoses. And none of it is about love or support, but fear: a fear so potent it’s driving otherwise sane and educated adults to betray a generation of vulnerable children. Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett, a psychologist who works with children in schools across London, goes so far as to call it “state-sanctioned child abuse”. When I ask whether it can really be true that children could be sent off to consult with gender clinics without the parents’ knowledge, she explains that, currently, “the confidentiality of a trans child actually trumps everything, including a parent’s right to know. And if a school believes a child is mature enough to understand the implications of what they’re doing, they don’t need parental consent.”Added to this, “if a child comes to school and tells the teachers ‘my parents are anti-trans’, the school can call in social services and treat it as a safeguarding concern under emotional abuse. Theoretically, the child could even be taken away.”"
Parents remove son from school in pupil gender row - "The parents of a six-year-old boy have removed him from his primary school in a row over whether another pupil should be allowed to wear a dress.Nigel and Sally Rowe said their son was confused as to why the child at the Church of England School on the Isle of Wight dressed as both a boy and a girl.The Diocese of Portsmouth, under which the school falls, said it was required to "respect diversity of all kinds"... The couple said under the school's bullying policy their son faced being disciplined for misidentifying the gender of the six-year-old pupil... the couple were being accused of "transphobic behaviour" because of their "refusal to acknowledge a transgender person's true gender".Mr Rowe said: "I am shocked by the suggestion, especially from a church school, that just because we question the notion that a six-year-old boy can really become a girl, we are transphobic""
Social justice is important but let's not lose our fucking minds - Posts - "it's transphobic for trans people to want surgery and/or hormones because their desires are based in cissexist ideas of bodies... if it's transphobic to consider body parts feminine than transitioning and altering ur body is transphobic"
Canadian Cancer Society Uses Transgender Woman On Cervical Cancer Page - "Sadly, this isn’t the first time cervical cancer and trans women have been linked together.Virtue signaling, being woke, or whatever you want to call it have taken a lengthy detour into the absurd.It goes without saying that those born male don’t have cervices, but, in the UK, there was chatter about offering male-to-female transgender patients smear tests–on the taxpayer’s dime. Despite not being anatomically equipped to qualify for the procedure, giving these individuals the procedure is to supposedly provide a confidence boost."
Why are male to female transsexuals about three times more common than female to male transsexuals?
Posted on 22 October on Quora and surprisingly still there (no, this is not by me):
Answer to Why are male to female transsexuals about three times more common than female to male transsexuals? - Quora
Autogynephilia is defined as a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism.
Autogynephilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women's clothing per se. The concept of autogynephilia defines a typology of MtF transsexualism and offers a theory of motivation for one type of MtF transsexualism.
Autogynephilia resembles a sexual orientation in that it involves elements of idealization and attachment as well as erotic desire. Nearly 3% of men in Western countries may experience autogynephilia.
Of note, men with it, view women as fetishes, with a fixation on sex, genitlia, sexuality rather than whole beings.
It can manifest itself in partial fetishes, fixation with periods, buying tampons and pads, wearing them to mimick being a female, wearing female clothing, using make up and looking female with no want to have sugery, take hormone replacement or puberty blockers, have top not bottom surgery.
Or it can be fantasing about the female form or dreaming of being female. It is limited by what turns them on which varies.
They have no desire to understand womanhood if it’s not sex related, they sometimss become porn stars or prostitutes, no because they need the money or have no options, they like the fantasy of someone fetishnising them as well.
Their motivations go far beyond a man hungry for sex, they often cross boundaries far beyond sending dick pics and intruding on female only spaces, part of the fetish is having women acknowledge they’re women, especially telling them they’re gorgeous or beautiful, it is part of the fetish, they get a sense of euphoria from it. Insistence of this acknowledgement makes them go as far as suing people who disagree or misgender, it is an obsession that grows larger and normal sex isn’t enough, they will go into other kinks, often mixing with pedophiles and fetishers who support this obsession as normal, forgetting it escalates, resulting in marital rape or rape.
The far left reframing this as a gender identity despite ethical moderate leftists speaking up has made those who speak up targets for their harassment and abuse, including LGBTs themselves, especially targetting LB women. They protest to fire psychologists in this field, who have a wait and see approach, using therapy first to minimise the influence in their lives, instead of pushing puberty blockers on kids knowing it can result in permanent sterilisation or hormone replacement that can affect overall health or irreversible sex reassignment surgery.
Trans women and trans men (mostly trans women since it’s TW that is affected by this), who have the refusal to acknowledge this as legitimate are mass victimising young transgenders, deterring them to seek help, because they don’t want to be associated with this. This is because they themselves have done something irreversible and now have to insist it’s being born in the wrong body, demanding people agree this is so.
Noticeably absent is research on trans men, feminists who research female oppression keep saying trans men are females so oppressed, they feel forced to take extreme measures to become like men so they get closer to equal treatment of the sexes, noticeably missing is trans men’s obsession with genitilia, sex, constant talks of SRS, posting hyper sexualised pictures of them online or participation in fetish clubs or groups.
Autogynephilia: an underappreciated paraphilia. - PubMed - NCBI
Answer to Why are male to female transsexuals about three times more common than female to male transsexuals? - Quora
Autogynephilia is defined as a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism.
Autogynephilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women's clothing per se. The concept of autogynephilia defines a typology of MtF transsexualism and offers a theory of motivation for one type of MtF transsexualism.
Autogynephilia resembles a sexual orientation in that it involves elements of idealization and attachment as well as erotic desire. Nearly 3% of men in Western countries may experience autogynephilia.
Of note, men with it, view women as fetishes, with a fixation on sex, genitlia, sexuality rather than whole beings.
It can manifest itself in partial fetishes, fixation with periods, buying tampons and pads, wearing them to mimick being a female, wearing female clothing, using make up and looking female with no want to have sugery, take hormone replacement or puberty blockers, have top not bottom surgery.
Or it can be fantasing about the female form or dreaming of being female. It is limited by what turns them on which varies.
They have no desire to understand womanhood if it’s not sex related, they sometimss become porn stars or prostitutes, no because they need the money or have no options, they like the fantasy of someone fetishnising them as well.
Their motivations go far beyond a man hungry for sex, they often cross boundaries far beyond sending dick pics and intruding on female only spaces, part of the fetish is having women acknowledge they’re women, especially telling them they’re gorgeous or beautiful, it is part of the fetish, they get a sense of euphoria from it. Insistence of this acknowledgement makes them go as far as suing people who disagree or misgender, it is an obsession that grows larger and normal sex isn’t enough, they will go into other kinks, often mixing with pedophiles and fetishers who support this obsession as normal, forgetting it escalates, resulting in marital rape or rape.
The far left reframing this as a gender identity despite ethical moderate leftists speaking up has made those who speak up targets for their harassment and abuse, including LGBTs themselves, especially targetting LB women. They protest to fire psychologists in this field, who have a wait and see approach, using therapy first to minimise the influence in their lives, instead of pushing puberty blockers on kids knowing it can result in permanent sterilisation or hormone replacement that can affect overall health or irreversible sex reassignment surgery.
Trans women and trans men (mostly trans women since it’s TW that is affected by this), who have the refusal to acknowledge this as legitimate are mass victimising young transgenders, deterring them to seek help, because they don’t want to be associated with this. This is because they themselves have done something irreversible and now have to insist it’s being born in the wrong body, demanding people agree this is so.
Noticeably absent is research on trans men, feminists who research female oppression keep saying trans men are females so oppressed, they feel forced to take extreme measures to become like men so they get closer to equal treatment of the sexes, noticeably missing is trans men’s obsession with genitilia, sex, constant talks of SRS, posting hyper sexualised pictures of them online or participation in fetish clubs or groups.
Autogynephilia: an underappreciated paraphilia. - PubMed - NCBI
Links - 27th December 2019 (1) (Trans Mania)
Vermont set to join handful of states in removing SRS minimum age for Medicaid recipients - "Vermont is a rural state with a small population. Yet, even with its small population, the NGO Outright Vermont “serves over 2,100 LGBTQ youth and their families, and nearly 5,000 educators and service providers in every county in Vermont.”The numbers of children and young people seeking gender services in Vermont have grown rapidly in recent years. And one reason for this rapid growth may have to do with the activities of this small but very influential charity. Charity Navigator.com, which provides information about a large number of charities, lists Outright Vermont – inexplicably – as a disaster relief organization. It was founded in 1989 for the laudable purpose of supporting lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. However, if you look at its activities in recent years, it seems to be largely concentrated on transgender issues.One of the ways the charity uses its funds (some of which are provided from government sources) is to run summer camps and provide gender-identity programs to Vermont public schools. Outright Vermont has more than 60 volunteers who go into schools across the state. Because the charity fails to consider the possibility that social contagion may account for a significant portion of the increase in transgender-identifying kids, it fails to see how much it may be perpetuating the very distress it seeks to alleviate... efforts to raise public awareness about anorexia created a contagion among adolescent girls in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, see the first chapter of Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters... Is the charity simply unaware of the increasing number of desisters and detransitioners? Surprisingly, no. The website links to a document developed by the University of Vermont that states “many children who are trans will end up identifying with their sex assigned at birth post puberty.” The document even acknowledges that “there is no way to predict which children will persist or desist as adults.” At the same time, the Outright Vermont website states that no age is too young for transition... Although Littman’s is the first study to focus exclusively on the possibility of social contagion, other studies have suggested the role it may play... this 2015 qualitative study surveyed 17 gender clinics around the world; some clinicians pointed out the influence of the Internet... wouldn’t it make more sense for this charity to spend its resources on looking at ways, other than transition, to help girls and boys become more comfortable in their bodies without the need to become medical patients for the rest of their lives? Perhaps the most distressing part about the Vermont proposed rule is this statement near the end of it:
“Vermont Medicaid does not cover reversal or modification of the surgeries approved under this rule.”
If incongruence between your biological sex and your perceived gender is sufficiently distressful to put you at risk of suicide, then it would work the same way in the other direction, wouldn’t it?... The word “youth” suggests adolescents. But in reality the rule opens the possibility of surgery at any age, including prepubescent children... The Swedish Pediatric Society recently published a statement [English translation] saying that “giving children the right to independently make life-changing decisions [about hormonal interventions for gender dysphoria…] lacks scientific evidence and is contrary to medical practice.”... This rule change opens the door to the government paying not only for double mastectomies for 12-year-old girls but also the removal of the penises and testicles of prepubescent boys. Can under-18 phalloplasties be far behind?"
4-year-old can begin transgender transition, says UK court - "The High Court of the United Kingdom has affirmed the right of a 4-year-old boy to live as a girl.As reported in the media, the facts of the case are a bit complicated and all names have been removed from reports. It appears that a foster couple was sending their their four-year-old son to school in a girl's uniform. Social workers accused them of being too quick to recognise the child (“H”) as suffering from gender dysphoria. They complained that the couple had “actively encouraged” the child and threatened to remove the child... They have another child, “R”, aged 13, who socially transitioned at 7-years-old. H is adopted and transitioned at 4; he is now 6. Another foster child (age unknown), who was with the family for three and a half years and left in 2007, also had gender identity issues."
"We Really Really Tried." A 2017 Letter from GIDS Clinicians Ignored by The Guardian - "there is an article about the current controversies surrounding Tavistock GIDS, and the concerns expressed by current and former GIDS clinicians and senior members of staff over the past few months.It has been a great disappointment to many on the Left that the Guardian has been largely silent on this issue. But two former GIDS clinicians sent a letter to the Guardian back in 2017 to alert them to serious concerns about what was going on within GIDS. One of the authors of the submission to the Guardian commented to us “we really really tried.” However, rather than jumping to publish such a devastating testimony – the kind of exclusive most journalists would give their right arm for – the Guardian chose to ignore it...
'These are young people for whom complex and profound confusion and turmoil is being collapsed into a one size fits all concrete explanation. ‘Trans’ can be used not as the compassionate realisation that some people need to take the always radical and courageous step to live their lives as though they had been born into the other sex role, but as a phoney panacea which seeks to shut down textured and nuanced discussion about these children and young people’s internal lives. If we can’t bear to hear the diversity within gender dysphoria then truly something has gone wrong – and believe me it has... The sloppiness of the language of both the internet and the politicians does you no favours with their conflation of sex and gender. This chimes so well in the era of post Truth anti expert hatred. I am really thinking that you are too young to be making decisions which will affect you and your body for the rest of your life: too young to drink, get married, have intercourse yet able to ‘consent’ to medical intervention. You should know that there is no unequivocally shared consensus on what you are undertaking; and the evidence, such as it is, suggests no greater health or happiness. Most of us at your age did not cherish our fertility, and the imagined easy alternative of adoption or surrogacy is far from that'"
Politicised trans groups put children at risk, says expert - "School counsellors and mental health service providers are bowing to pressures from ‘highly politicised’ transgender groups to affirm children’s beliefs that they were born the wrong sex, a leading expert has warned.Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and ex-governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, whose Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) is the only NHS clinic to provide gender counselling and transitioning, said many experts were living in fear of being labelled transphobic, which was having an impact on their objectivity... Evans quoted the experience of “Dagny”, a woman who identified as a trans man in her teens, has now detransitioned and says she was influenced by views expressed on the social network, Tumblr.“One of these unhealthy beliefs I held was the belief that if you have gender dysphoria, you must transition,” Dagny has said. “And anyone that appeared to stand in my way was a transphobe – an alt-right bigot.”Evans resigned as a governor of the trust in February in protest at its response to criticism from a former member of its council of governors, David Bell, who had raised concerns from 10 members of staff... “The mind that is free to think or ask difficult questions is treated as a real threat; TV producers and journalists continually report that while people are willing to speak in confidence to them about their reservations about treatment in these areas, they shy away from being named, for fear of being accused of being bigoted and transphobic and sometimes either disciplined or even sacked for speaking their mind.”Since his high-profile resignation, Evans’s concerns have broadened as parents approach him for advice about their children.“They confirm that a gender-affirmative approach is being adopted by many school counsellors and CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services)”... the trust had data showing that children who took hormone blockers had reported an increase in thoughts of suicide and self-harm... The Newsnight expose followed an open letter posted online by a former clinician at the Leeds branch of GIDS, Dr Kirsty Entwistle, who warned that “traumatic early experiences”, which might be a factor in a young person’s desire to transition, were not being investigated by medical staff out of fear of being labelled transphobic."
The purge of trans-sceptical academics - "Sarah Honeychurch, one of the editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the journal’s managing editor, asking her to resign her position. This was all because she had signed a letter to The Sunday Times, in which a number of academics critiqued the close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities. The letter argues that via the education section of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme, trans-awareness workshops are being delivered to academics which present only one set of ideas on gender, some of which are anti-scientific yet presented as objective fact. In the second instance, Michele Moore (full disclosure: I have just co-edited a book with her), another signatory of The Sunday Times letter and honorary professor at Essex University, found herself the subject of a petition demanding her resignation from the journal Disability and Society, where she is editor-in-chief... Friend, in justifying his decision to push out Honeychurch, says that ‘just as marginalised students who feel unsafe in school face obstacles to learning, marginalised authors who feel unsafe in journals face obstacles to writing’. ‘Before any debate can take place, our authors must be safe’, he continues. ‘[This] is not a matter of shutting down an argument or censoring a perspective. It is about holding space for a group that needs protection against the entrenched powers of authority already in place.’... Under the banner of ‘diversity and inclusion’, academics as well as students are busy building a pampering culture, in which there is a refusal to countenance any view that challenges transgender ideology.These people are campaigning not for freedom of speech, but freedom from speech"
If you feel threatened by academic freedom, just fire anyone who disagrees with you!
Britain's first official transgender student officer suspended - "Britain's first official ‘transgender students’ officer’ has been suspended over allegations that she posted explicit photographs on an online blog.Jess Bradley, who was born male but refers to herself as a ‘nonbinary trans woman’, was the first person to be elected to the full-time paid role by the National Union of Students (NUS).But she was suspended from her post last week while the NUS carries out an internal investigation into claims that she published pictures of male genitalia under the headline Exhibitionizm on her personal blog... Ms Bradley previously attracted controversy when she defended an attack by transgender activist Tara Wolf, who was born male, on a 60-year-old feminist campaigner in London’s Hyde Park last September"
Satiria - Posts - ""Testosterone is important for normal male brain maturation. Here is a report of an 11 y/o boy on puberty blockers: IQ dropped 11% (80 to 71) after 17 mo. As the EIC of the BMJ has said, PB are being used in a state of “profound scientific ignorance.”"
"The huge jump may be partly because @TaviAndPort advertised their service on a BBC children's TV programme first shown in 2014, and repeated numerous times since then. In this clip, Dr Polly Carmichael talks about the 'benefits' of taking hormone #pubertyblockers."
"72 reasons BBC Newsround's promotion of #PubertyBlockers as harmless is not a scandal & should not be investigated by the #BBCtrust."
Yeyo on Twitter - "Puberty blockers to children has the potential to become the Thalidomide scandal of our time https://t.co/iMxrJvvMvN"
Blaire White on Twitter - "Anyone who says that trans women aren't women I curse with the cramps and diarrhea I'm having today. #Girlslikeus #PMS #TransWomenareWomen #TransWomenPMS #TransIsBeautiful"
"Trans women do not PMS. Your diarrhea seems to be due to the fact that you're full of shit."
If a trans woman claims she has PMS, can we say she has mental illness>
Leftist Celebrates “Gender Transition” of His 4-Year-Old Son - "A leftist on Twitter celebrated the “gender transition” of his 4-year-old son, triumphing the fact that “Waylon” had become “Willow”.Mike Ginicola tweeted, “It’s official, we have a 4 year old daughter! Waylon is now Willow. Took A LOT of paperwork to make the gender transition.”He posted an image of a birth certificate where the child’s name had been changed... The notion that a 4-year-old child has any idea about sexuality or ‘gender transitioning’ is deranged"
Court orders Christian to pay $55,000 to trans politician for calling him ‘biological male’ - "A B.C. human rights tribunal has ruled that a Christian activist discriminated against a man who claims to be "female" by distributing flyers that referred to the man, who was running for political office at the time, as a "biological male." ... the tribunal further declared there’s no room for any public debate in the matter... Whatcott’s lawyer, Dr. Charles Lugosi, intended to give evidence that Oger was, in fact, a biological male as a defense.Tribunal judge Devyn Cousineau, however, ruled “the ‘truth’ of the statements in the flyer is not a defense.”... The ruling, penned by Cousineau, declared that even questioning transgenderism is discriminatory."
Science is transphobic
Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women - "Canada's oldest rape crisis centre has been stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women in some of its services.Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter said it was the victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” after refusing to change its policy of only offering some services to female-born women... Councillor Christine Boyle said the centre's policy went against the city's policy of welcoming all people... Vancouver Rape Relief, which opened in 1973, strictly bans men from its premises to protect its clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence.“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” Lee Lakeman, one of the centre's founders, wrote in 2006."
Too bad this won't make people ask why men are being discriminated against in the first place
"KILL TERFS": Vancouver’s women-only rape shelter vandalized with death threats, rat nailed to door - "A Vancouver rape relief shelter alleges they have been the target of vandalism and death threats over their “woman-only” policy.Photos shared by the official Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter Twitter account show several threats and messages scrawled on the centre’s windows like “KILL TERFS” and “TRANS POWER”... According to the shelter, they have had past instances where dead animals like skunks were shoved through the mail slot of the building. In one case rape victims attending the shelter encountered a dead rat which was nailed to the door. “The women who found it were from our support group so they are battered women and rape victims, and one of them said: Haven’t we suffered enough,” said Kerner.Since the tweet was released, Kerner claims that the shelter has received an outpouring of support and donations from concerned members of the public."
“Vermont Medicaid does not cover reversal or modification of the surgeries approved under this rule.”
If incongruence between your biological sex and your perceived gender is sufficiently distressful to put you at risk of suicide, then it would work the same way in the other direction, wouldn’t it?... The word “youth” suggests adolescents. But in reality the rule opens the possibility of surgery at any age, including prepubescent children... The Swedish Pediatric Society recently published a statement [English translation] saying that “giving children the right to independently make life-changing decisions [about hormonal interventions for gender dysphoria…] lacks scientific evidence and is contrary to medical practice.”... This rule change opens the door to the government paying not only for double mastectomies for 12-year-old girls but also the removal of the penises and testicles of prepubescent boys. Can under-18 phalloplasties be far behind?"
4-year-old can begin transgender transition, says UK court - "The High Court of the United Kingdom has affirmed the right of a 4-year-old boy to live as a girl.As reported in the media, the facts of the case are a bit complicated and all names have been removed from reports. It appears that a foster couple was sending their their four-year-old son to school in a girl's uniform. Social workers accused them of being too quick to recognise the child (“H”) as suffering from gender dysphoria. They complained that the couple had “actively encouraged” the child and threatened to remove the child... They have another child, “R”, aged 13, who socially transitioned at 7-years-old. H is adopted and transitioned at 4; he is now 6. Another foster child (age unknown), who was with the family for three and a half years and left in 2007, also had gender identity issues."
"We Really Really Tried." A 2017 Letter from GIDS Clinicians Ignored by The Guardian - "there is an article about the current controversies surrounding Tavistock GIDS, and the concerns expressed by current and former GIDS clinicians and senior members of staff over the past few months.It has been a great disappointment to many on the Left that the Guardian has been largely silent on this issue. But two former GIDS clinicians sent a letter to the Guardian back in 2017 to alert them to serious concerns about what was going on within GIDS. One of the authors of the submission to the Guardian commented to us “we really really tried.” However, rather than jumping to publish such a devastating testimony – the kind of exclusive most journalists would give their right arm for – the Guardian chose to ignore it...
'These are young people for whom complex and profound confusion and turmoil is being collapsed into a one size fits all concrete explanation. ‘Trans’ can be used not as the compassionate realisation that some people need to take the always radical and courageous step to live their lives as though they had been born into the other sex role, but as a phoney panacea which seeks to shut down textured and nuanced discussion about these children and young people’s internal lives. If we can’t bear to hear the diversity within gender dysphoria then truly something has gone wrong – and believe me it has... The sloppiness of the language of both the internet and the politicians does you no favours with their conflation of sex and gender. This chimes so well in the era of post Truth anti expert hatred. I am really thinking that you are too young to be making decisions which will affect you and your body for the rest of your life: too young to drink, get married, have intercourse yet able to ‘consent’ to medical intervention. You should know that there is no unequivocally shared consensus on what you are undertaking; and the evidence, such as it is, suggests no greater health or happiness. Most of us at your age did not cherish our fertility, and the imagined easy alternative of adoption or surrogacy is far from that'"
Politicised trans groups put children at risk, says expert - "School counsellors and mental health service providers are bowing to pressures from ‘highly politicised’ transgender groups to affirm children’s beliefs that they were born the wrong sex, a leading expert has warned.Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and ex-governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, whose Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) is the only NHS clinic to provide gender counselling and transitioning, said many experts were living in fear of being labelled transphobic, which was having an impact on their objectivity... Evans quoted the experience of “Dagny”, a woman who identified as a trans man in her teens, has now detransitioned and says she was influenced by views expressed on the social network, Tumblr.“One of these unhealthy beliefs I held was the belief that if you have gender dysphoria, you must transition,” Dagny has said. “And anyone that appeared to stand in my way was a transphobe – an alt-right bigot.”Evans resigned as a governor of the trust in February in protest at its response to criticism from a former member of its council of governors, David Bell, who had raised concerns from 10 members of staff... “The mind that is free to think or ask difficult questions is treated as a real threat; TV producers and journalists continually report that while people are willing to speak in confidence to them about their reservations about treatment in these areas, they shy away from being named, for fear of being accused of being bigoted and transphobic and sometimes either disciplined or even sacked for speaking their mind.”Since his high-profile resignation, Evans’s concerns have broadened as parents approach him for advice about their children.“They confirm that a gender-affirmative approach is being adopted by many school counsellors and CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services)”... the trust had data showing that children who took hormone blockers had reported an increase in thoughts of suicide and self-harm... The Newsnight expose followed an open letter posted online by a former clinician at the Leeds branch of GIDS, Dr Kirsty Entwistle, who warned that “traumatic early experiences”, which might be a factor in a young person’s desire to transition, were not being investigated by medical staff out of fear of being labelled transphobic."
The purge of trans-sceptical academics - "Sarah Honeychurch, one of the editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the journal’s managing editor, asking her to resign her position. This was all because she had signed a letter to The Sunday Times, in which a number of academics critiqued the close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities. The letter argues that via the education section of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme, trans-awareness workshops are being delivered to academics which present only one set of ideas on gender, some of which are anti-scientific yet presented as objective fact. In the second instance, Michele Moore (full disclosure: I have just co-edited a book with her), another signatory of The Sunday Times letter and honorary professor at Essex University, found herself the subject of a petition demanding her resignation from the journal Disability and Society, where she is editor-in-chief... Friend, in justifying his decision to push out Honeychurch, says that ‘just as marginalised students who feel unsafe in school face obstacles to learning, marginalised authors who feel unsafe in journals face obstacles to writing’. ‘Before any debate can take place, our authors must be safe’, he continues. ‘[This] is not a matter of shutting down an argument or censoring a perspective. It is about holding space for a group that needs protection against the entrenched powers of authority already in place.’... Under the banner of ‘diversity and inclusion’, academics as well as students are busy building a pampering culture, in which there is a refusal to countenance any view that challenges transgender ideology.These people are campaigning not for freedom of speech, but freedom from speech"
If you feel threatened by academic freedom, just fire anyone who disagrees with you!
Britain's first official transgender student officer suspended - "Britain's first official ‘transgender students’ officer’ has been suspended over allegations that she posted explicit photographs on an online blog.Jess Bradley, who was born male but refers to herself as a ‘nonbinary trans woman’, was the first person to be elected to the full-time paid role by the National Union of Students (NUS).But she was suspended from her post last week while the NUS carries out an internal investigation into claims that she published pictures of male genitalia under the headline Exhibitionizm on her personal blog... Ms Bradley previously attracted controversy when she defended an attack by transgender activist Tara Wolf, who was born male, on a 60-year-old feminist campaigner in London’s Hyde Park last September"
Satiria - Posts - ""Testosterone is important for normal male brain maturation. Here is a report of an 11 y/o boy on puberty blockers: IQ dropped 11% (80 to 71) after 17 mo. As the EIC of the BMJ has said, PB are being used in a state of “profound scientific ignorance.”"
"The huge jump may be partly because @TaviAndPort advertised their service on a BBC children's TV programme first shown in 2014, and repeated numerous times since then. In this clip, Dr Polly Carmichael talks about the 'benefits' of taking hormone #pubertyblockers."
"72 reasons BBC Newsround's promotion of #PubertyBlockers as harmless is not a scandal & should not be investigated by the #BBCtrust."
Yeyo on Twitter - "Puberty blockers to children has the potential to become the Thalidomide scandal of our time https://t.co/iMxrJvvMvN"
Blaire White on Twitter - "Anyone who says that trans women aren't women I curse with the cramps and diarrhea I'm having today. #Girlslikeus #PMS #TransWomenareWomen #TransWomenPMS #TransIsBeautiful"
"Trans women do not PMS. Your diarrhea seems to be due to the fact that you're full of shit."
If a trans woman claims she has PMS, can we say she has mental illness>
Leftist Celebrates “Gender Transition” of His 4-Year-Old Son - "A leftist on Twitter celebrated the “gender transition” of his 4-year-old son, triumphing the fact that “Waylon” had become “Willow”.Mike Ginicola tweeted, “It’s official, we have a 4 year old daughter! Waylon is now Willow. Took A LOT of paperwork to make the gender transition.”He posted an image of a birth certificate where the child’s name had been changed... The notion that a 4-year-old child has any idea about sexuality or ‘gender transitioning’ is deranged"
Court orders Christian to pay $55,000 to trans politician for calling him ‘biological male’ - "A B.C. human rights tribunal has ruled that a Christian activist discriminated against a man who claims to be "female" by distributing flyers that referred to the man, who was running for political office at the time, as a "biological male." ... the tribunal further declared there’s no room for any public debate in the matter... Whatcott’s lawyer, Dr. Charles Lugosi, intended to give evidence that Oger was, in fact, a biological male as a defense.Tribunal judge Devyn Cousineau, however, ruled “the ‘truth’ of the statements in the flyer is not a defense.”... The ruling, penned by Cousineau, declared that even questioning transgenderism is discriminatory."
Science is transphobic
Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women - "Canada's oldest rape crisis centre has been stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women in some of its services.Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter said it was the victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” after refusing to change its policy of only offering some services to female-born women... Councillor Christine Boyle said the centre's policy went against the city's policy of welcoming all people... Vancouver Rape Relief, which opened in 1973, strictly bans men from its premises to protect its clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence.“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” Lee Lakeman, one of the centre's founders, wrote in 2006."
Too bad this won't make people ask why men are being discriminated against in the first place
"KILL TERFS": Vancouver’s women-only rape shelter vandalized with death threats, rat nailed to door - "A Vancouver rape relief shelter alleges they have been the target of vandalism and death threats over their “woman-only” policy.Photos shared by the official Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter Twitter account show several threats and messages scrawled on the centre’s windows like “KILL TERFS” and “TRANS POWER”... According to the shelter, they have had past instances where dead animals like skunks were shoved through the mail slot of the building. In one case rape victims attending the shelter encountered a dead rat which was nailed to the door. “The women who found it were from our support group so they are battered women and rape victims, and one of them said: Haven’t we suffered enough,” said Kerner.Since the tweet was released, Kerner claims that the shelter has received an outpouring of support and donations from concerned members of the public."