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minoanmissDisney is releasing an awesome-looking movie about menarche (and with a cool Chinese-Canadian protag)
Disney is supporting every single Florida politician behind the new homophobic gag law.
How many kids is Disney helping vs hurting?
I hate this math.
Disney is supporting every single Florida politician behind the new homophobic gag law.
How many kids is Disney helping vs hurting?
I hate this math.
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Date: 2022-03-12 05:50 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG9o9m0LsbI
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Date: 2022-03-12 08:52 pm (UTC)Intriguing!
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Date: 2022-03-12 06:05 pm (UTC)(And I'd say literally funding hate is always going to be more hurtful than distributing symbolic narratives.)
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Date: 2022-03-12 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 10:13 pm (UTC)Yeah, this little post of mine is mostly ARRGH WHY ARE PEOPLE. I remember being taught to hate as a hobby back in the church of my childhood. It always felt like drawing was a better use of my time than writing homophobic letters, that talking about Barbies and astronauts were better subjects for conversation with my friends than why they should Give Their Hearts to Jesus.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 10:35 pm (UTC)ex-fundie fistbump
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 08:52 pm (UTC)You're absolutely right. It's like businesses at Pride -- they don't care about queer people, and Disney doesn't care about kids. It's just another way to make money.
But. I think itt does mean something culturally that it can be viable to make money with a positive movie about menarche, just like it means something that it's now a money maker rather than a money loser for a business to associate with Pride. Is there a way to pry these kinds of progress away from the grips of the evil and the uncaring?
Probably a question for better brains than mine. But if I come up with anything better than inchoate frustrated noises I will write it down.
frustrated noises
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Date: 2022-03-12 09:18 pm (UTC)I guess it means that the appearance of diversity and inclusiveness are profitable, most likely because more sub-markets respond. I don't know if that is a good thing or not. You call it "progress", so it sounds like you think it is a good thing, but I don't want to assume, nor do I have a way to answer.
anyway, look where the money being made by such symbolic narratives is flowing: in this case, directly into the pockets of De Santis and his allies
Is there a way to pry these kinds of progress away from the grips of the evil and the uncaring
I don't believe in evil. And I don't think "progress" is an abstract to be expropriated. All I can say is that the cultural omnipotence of obscenities like Disney is to be lamented and, I'd hope, dismantled, if only by a proliferation of independent voices.
.
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Date: 2022-03-12 09:40 pm (UTC)I guess it means that the appearance of diversity and inclusiveness are profitable, most likely because more sub-markets respond. I don't know if that is a good thing or not. You call it "progress", so it sounds like you think it is a good thing,
I first started thinking about this concept when I started noticing TV and magazine ads with Black families in them. In the US a widespread and politically relevant idea is that Black people don't have families, only single mothers on welfare and sperm donors in jail, so I think it means something about our progress in terms of buying power and social acceptance that businesspeople whose choices are governed entirely by money think they can get more money by appealing to us than by appealing to those who hate us. (I'm pretty sure every such ad with a Black family occasions at least a couple of angry letters. I remember a few years back when there was a huge to-do about a Cheerios ad featuring an interracial family.)
It's not that the businesspeople care one tiny whit more about the dignity of Black people than they ever did, but in part because we are slowly managing to earn and keep more and in part because Black people are working our way into the business world, this can be seen as an indicator of progress on our part (I think). This seems to map to other groups I'm in, such as queer people and women and so on, at least to a degree.
I do see these developments as progress but that doesn't mean I see everything or that my conclusions are unassailable -- some of the reasons I post about my ideas is to get more information, especially from my well informed friends, and to critique and refine my thinking.
anyway, look where the money being made by such symbolic narratives is flowing: in this case, directly into the pockets of De Santis and his allies
Yeah. :( People like DeSantis who make all these deliberate decisions to use their power to hurt and harm and destroy people... it may be the Christian kid I used to be, but I can't disavow the concept of evil quite yet, looking at that kind of behavior.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:39 pm (UTC)Expanding bourgeois norms isn't necessarily progress, I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it so often comes at the expense of others, both in and out of the group.
(I made clear that I don't believe in evil, because people like De Santis aren't doing what they do due to any outside force. They're entirely conscious and proud of what they're doing. Their effects are horrific, but the causes are literally human and not supernatural. That's all I meant.)
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:58 pm (UTC)This is why I post this kind of thing -- I clearly need to read this! Thank you for the rec!
And "expanding bourgeoise norms isn't necessarily progress" is a good reminder for me. I do tend towards the respectability politics sometimes.
I made clear that I don't believe in evil, because people like De Santis aren't doing what they do due to any outside force.
Oh definitely. This made me giggle, actually -- when I was a kid I was told a lot about the Devil "putting bad ideas in [my] head", and I just visualized a stereotypical Devil inserting Badness into DeSantis's head. And I giggled. But yeah, I don't believe in that External Force framing either. They choose to do terrible things of themselves.
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Date: 2022-03-13 04:39 pm (UTC)I don't believe in Satan or anything like that, but the concept of "evil" is very meaningful to me, as a characteristic of individuals' personalities and actions, on a par with "selfishness", "forgiveness", "generosity", and so forth.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:03 pm (UTC)-pokes in- This is why I get salty every time Pride Month rolls around because we get to have a parade while... businesses claim they care and have rainbow-themed stuff, while sending money to corrupt, anti-LGBT politicians, and queer and trans people are still getting murdered, attacked, and committing suicide. Pride Month actually accomplishes little except a way for cishet people to feel good about supporting us, to the point where I've stopped acknowledging it. I hate being That Perpetually Cranky Trans Queer Guy but years of this shit has done this to me.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:11 pm (UTC)These are the things I find myself ambivalent on for the same reasons. I WANT to believe in the idea of Standing Up And Being Proud Of Who We Are and in all the work generations of queer people did (and that all the pain and loss and struggle and sacrifice meant something). But then I look at where we've ended up with these kind of hollow sorts of Pride full of the same corporations that fund politicians who put through hideous transphobic and homophobic laws... yeah. I hear you. I don't know which way to step, myself.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 10:34 pm (UTC)I hate that you've been given reason to be that bitter about it, if that makes sense.
hugs you
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 07:51 pm (UTC)I don't even know that the calculus is that simple. It sucks, Harry.
*hugs*
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Date: 2022-03-12 08:43 pm (UTC)The calculus is uncalulateable, yeah. I mean, I can imagine a particular kid who watches the movie and learns inestimable stuff about the period he just started having but he still has no idea about why he knows he's a boy when everyone around him calls him a girl because no one will even pretend to understand let alone answer his hesitant questions.
How could we calculate help vs harm for this kid, let alone all of them?
UGH. UGH.
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Date: 2022-03-12 09:22 pm (UTC)*HUGS*
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Date: 2022-03-12 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-12 08:45 pm (UTC)Yeah, but Disney's gatekeepers will judge whether the next movie gets made, and gets made by her, by how much money they get for it. It's not that I want to see this -- I'll probably watch it off Youtube -- it's that I wanted 11 year old me to see it. I want 11 year olds now to see it. I want more, but how do we get more without supporting Disney in all their horriblenesses too?
makes frustrated noises
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:13 pm (UTC)Ugh.
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Date: 2022-03-12 10:37 pm (UTC)*hugs you*
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Date: 2022-03-12 11:06 pm (UTC)I need an icon for "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism"
45 minutes later
MS Paint Jorts The Cat anticapitalism icon will do it
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Date: 2022-03-13 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-13 01:59 am (UTC)pets Jorts and does not butter him
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Date: 2022-03-13 01:53 am (UTC)"While I'm on the subject of Disney funding anti-gay legislators, it is important to point out that they are funding them not because they are anti-gay (they don't actually care that mch about that) but because they are `pro-business.' What does it mean to be pro-business?"
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Date: 2022-03-13 03:33 am (UTC)Hooray for Abigail! We were just discussing her over dinner tonight.
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Date: 2022-03-15 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-15 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-13 04:21 am (UTC)but Disney also consistently censors age-appropriate LGBT content out of both Disney films and Pixar films :(
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Date: 2022-03-13 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-13 10:11 am (UTC)From a practical point of view, for a group in a societally weaker position, trying to influence action is more useful than trying to influence motivation. It was a good thing for Asian-Americans that Asians stopped being default villains in Hollywood films (at least for a while), even if it was because studios wanted access to Chinese and other international markets, rather than because they all suddenly decided that it was morally unacceptable.
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Date: 2022-03-16 07:24 pm (UTC)You've got the customers, the employees of the various divisions of the company, the contractors and subcontractors, and the shareholders. And intersection happens within all of those groups, right? So the fight continues, and so some factions are still fighting a delaying action against doing right by the affected communities. On both sides of the corporate walls.