Add Dustin Hoffman to the list.

The list of people that nobody should be surprised about because everyone should know by now that show business is filled with disgusting degenerates.

Which makes it that much more humorous when they band together to tell us how bad someone or something else is.

Bill Oreilly? Roger Ailes?

Sexual harassment and assault are pandemic, but especially so whenever an extreme minority of highly influential people are given make-or-break power over others. This behaviour happens in movies, yes. But it also happens in news, politics, venture capital, tech, and even small offices around the world.

Taking joy in the fact that women were sexually assaulted because it was Hollywood liberals doing it is a ****ty attitude. You guys really do have the government you deserve.

Ball's in your court, sanctimonious moral hypocrites.

Or are you going to tell me that the people who made that movie also diddled the people they were preaching to?

One thing 2016 seems to have revealed is that if you simply tell people that they are immoral for some reason, at some point you will piss off enough of them to the point that they form a mass movement centered around rebuking the pretense that they should even have to apologize or hide their true colors. So you get people who are openly racist supporting Trump, with the excuse that liberals pushed them over the edge, and figured they had nothing to lose by coming out as racist (is this the right wing counterpart of coming out as gay?).

Open question: how many celebrity harassment scandals will it take before a similar movement emerges as backlash against the career destruction of beloved, famous men, in which the members of said movement make a point of openly embracing sexual assault as a necessary tactic to trigger, piss off, and frighten liberals, all the while feeling vindicated in committing the crimes they secretly lusted for all along?

CW: language, gyration, scientologist



Supposedly based on a real guy.

Oh, I don't take any joy in it. We knowingly elected one serial woman abuser. Recently elected an accused serial abuser. Ted Kennedy was adored and killed a woman. Hollywood has been infamous since its inception for the casting couch. Jones mentioned the word hypocrites above which is something I'd been thinking about lately with regards to this issue. With all sympathies towards the victims they'll rail against Trump, the NRA, etc. and now look at what they remained silent about. Now I got that it's intimidating to be the first to be the face of the accuser but that takes real courage. Taking a PC position in tax deductible appearances doesn't. Not to mention they end up being edited in with those on the other end, the victimizers all taking the same position. Or how about Hilary Clinton railing against Trump's record with women while she figuratively buried every one that came out against her husband?

Actually, none of this is an argument but rather just pointing out that I'm not "happy" to see any of these reports or dismissing others.

I think if you look at the entertainment industry as a monolithic group, then yeah, you can call individual actors and activists hypocrites. But wouldn't that charge be better reserved for the actual people wielding the power, like Harvey Weinstein (if, say, he produced a bunch of movies chastising the morally degenerate, all the while committing the same crimes behind closed doors)?

I don't see this as an indictment of liberals as some monolithic (out?)group, without its own internal power structure.

Rather, I see this as an indictment of the (alt) right backlash against feminism. For all the screeching on the right about the maligned straight shooting white male, the (much hated, more recent) feminists really did have a point about the awfulness of male-dominated hierarchical power structures in practice.

Look, I know this is painful to hear, but yeah, it's as simple as saying the word patriarchy. Sorry your side was was wrong.

All this is moot, of course, if you can show me that the right is full of moral saints and not child-diddling priests.

Sure, we could say that. If we wanted to assume this is a male problem, and we wanted to assume this is violence of men perpetrated on women and gay youth.

Except it isn’t. Female producers have also been documented as part of this problem, fully complicit in the objectification, harassment, and “grooming” of talent.

As long as we’re being honest about this problem, how about we be totally honest about it? This problem, like too many others, is the owners of productive capital abusing their privileged position in society to extract rents and exploit labor. Sexual assault in Hollywood is a symptom of the same problem as insider trading and union busting. And if you want to actually fix this problem, it will have the same solution.

Lol, how did I not see this punchline coming. And you're not wrong to point it out.

At any rate, I will readily confess that the whole patriarchy schtick is still way too blunt and overplayed. But in a pinch, the ones pointing it out have a point.

As for women who enable it, yeah the leftist critique certainly makes sense (probably the most sense). As an aside I noticed that this class of people essential represent the Aunts in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tail: women who brainwash other women into subservience to men. (BTW, in case anybody is wondering, I read that book before it was made into a TV show. +1 indie street cred).

I guess my only salient point there was that the right was wrong to have the knee-jerk reaction to charges of patriarchy. Because in a blunt way, it is approximately true. I am undecided if we should still fault the "liberal" identity politics people for being so over the top.

Speaking of identity politics, the thought crossed my mind about why it leaves such a bad taste in my mouth: it is either pretentious, or evil, or somewhere in between. Both seem rather nasty, and have more to do with survival than frank truth (whether we are talking about left or right wing examples)

For the record: I guess what was really moronic of the identity politics people was that they were self-absorbed enough in their own fake cause of promoting their hapless attempts to change the minds of people who would never change, in lieu of an actual leftist agenda (which I've brought up plenty of times).

I am amused to think that extending this kind of leftist critique to anything and everything in this manner smells a bit like the libertarian retort that everything would be perfect if we had "real freedom".

Of course, the difference is, that the libertarian flavor of idealism isn't even stable or coherent in principle.

The right is wrong in a lot of ways. This is kinda what I was talking about above:

Socialism is literally the destruction of power imbalances that allow these kinds of abuses to happen and go uncorrected for decades. The whole point of socialism is to level out our relationships with others and give equal access to opportunity. That doesn’t mean equal outcomes; great people can still break away from their peers if they do great things. What it does mean, though, is that you don’t need to suck off Harvey Weinstein before you are allowed to make a movie. The cost of this to society is mostly that Harvey Weinstein gets sucked off less often.

The same principle applies elsewhere. Today, you mostly don’t have much choice about accepting unsafe working conditions as a labourer. If you complain you are risking being fired and blacklisted, and that will have serious consequences for your family. Choosing between deaths isn’t a real choice. But with socialism, you are free to tell an abusive employer to stick it.

Basically, if you want to live like a libertarian, you should vote socialist.

Anyway, this is why socialists tend to emphasize the economic factors over the social factors. Because really the economic factors are where the social problems come from.

Well that's a very nice Canadian perspective, but as an American, I will tell you that the ideal society comes when we convince the last white male not to be hateful, and stimulate the economy with enough fed cash so we reach full employment and every single person can live the 9-5 dream of corporate enslavement.

The problem with socialists is that they are too idealistic. You need to lower your standards!

This is a reasonable observation about socialists, and I’m sorry to report that it isn’t an original one. Mainstream progressives mostly view it as a tone-deaf response from wonkish white socialists that unintentionally minimizes the problems of PoC and other alienated groups.

This was BLM’s complaint about the Sanders campaign, for example.

What I’d say in response to that, though, is that as a privileged white man I have no idea about the social injustices faced by women and people of colour. But I have a pretty good idea where my privilege comes from: unequal access to opportunity. Socialism is solving a problem that I can understand and discuss intelligently. If all mainstream progressives and social democrats want is more ultra-rich women and PoC, then, well, they can **** off because that won’t actually solve anything.

lol

Social hierarchies lead to bad things, y'all.

But we agree it is much worse and more worthy of discussion if the people at the top are on my TV screen, no? Dustin Hoffman = elemental evil. Let the Twitter war begin.

Kind of sad how the larger discussion about power structures gets lost in the noise of scapegoating and finger pointing. I guess we can all agree that the kind of charges of hypocrisy made by Wookie06 aren't the most productive, when we are talking about somewhat universal behavior that seems to be elicited by power imbalances.

I do think it will probably be helpful to make some examples out of these guys, just so this whole wave of career destruction can be put into textbook training examples for acceptable workplace behavior. Not saying it is a perfect solution, but not a bad use of the opportunity.

Well we’re technological, industrial, and agricultural now, so I think that ship has sailed. In order to actually do much of anything we need to have personal property (at least) and that means having an authority empowered to protect property rights.

And if you have to have that authority, you might as well have a market economy too. You’re already >99% of the way there. (Of course, I wouldn’t really expect most people to know you can have a market based socialist economy.)

The difference is that, when you have equal access to opportunity, it makes it a lot easier for concerned citizens to run for office, since you wouldn’t need a billionaire to bless your campaign. We should already have this today, with the internet offering a literal post-scarcity economy of public access. Which is probably why the Republican FCC is working so hard to end that in the US.

It's a right-wing phenomenon to get particularly huffy about Hollywood sex scandals. IIRC most on the right hardly acknowledge Trump's multiple problematic encounters with minors.

I'm not saying it's the fundamental problem here, but so long as we're going to be faux-idealistic about the efficacy of existing democratic institutions like the ballot box: way too much of what you are saying involves taking present day technological and economic progress at face value, removed from historical baggage, and thinking of something new.

Like, for example: people just don't see the internet as having the kind of potential to improve democracy. (To Americans, government and the civil service is something that gets screwed up by incompetence, creating things like "death panels".) To almost everybody (including me, until you made me stop to think about it), the internet is approximately a place where commerce and voluntary communication take place-not a primitive concept that we can use to knock down existing assumptions about the kind of society we can build. People are just too stuck in the present way of doing things. (And to the extent to which people think of building new things, well, this usually boils down to the empires they imagine building around their own mythical entrepreneurial breakthrough.)

At any rate, it might not matter, since adopting an entirely new perspective will be in vogue once the heads start to roll. And on the flip side, until then it won't matter, since it won't be good enough.

Okay I admit that was kind of a rant.

I bet the problems aren't half as hard as the look once we realize how anti-democratic Republican various activism is.

My only fear is that the privilege billionaires have over the political system is something they will absolutely never surrender peacefully, and as much as I joke about it an actual reign of terror or reds vs whites battle sound horrific. I'm just not sure what sorta options there are to actually remove these ****s from power that avoids violence. We know how quickly they'll call the riot police, anyway.

Just walk right in, Roy Batty style. Crush their skulls with your bare hands.

As always, someone on the alt right has to cynically use every event as a means to force the media spotlight on themself. It would be comical if there weren't a hundred thousand nodding their heads with him.

Can you guys picture Donald Trump tearfully crushing Vladimir Putin's skull?

So in America a repeat of the collapse of Weimar/ascent of the Nazis is happening simultaneously alongside the Russian Revolution? Damn Daniel. 21st century America is a greatest hits of 20th century European catastrophes.

Yah lol

I'll get right on becoming a replicant ��

http://www.pcgamer.com/cia-archive-reveals-that-osama-bin-laden-liked-retro-games-and-anime/

The real scandal tbh.

Feminists seem to be far more anti- traditional role of women than anti- male power.

The entertainment industry is full of gross degenerates (including those media gross dudes who are definitely just part of the entertainment industry) because, like all of our other systems, it is oversized and centralized, and that produces gross power structures, which are gross because people are gross, so when gross people are in the gross power structures they do gross things.

The only way to really stop this is to get rid of people, because people are gross. Alternatively:

"A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die."

It's true that we can't ever be fully rid of sexual assault, but to claim we can't analyze institutional structure and figure out which reduce it is not.

Reverting to a dead end agrarian civilization means surrendering to the inevitable nGRB that will scour terrestrial life from existence. So this is either a great argument or a terrible one, depending on how you feel about that.

Personally I don’t find anything too spiritually uplifting about leaving an empty universe of barren rocks uncolonized.

Since I just watched The People vs. Larry Flynt last night: Are all people gross?

What about Jerry Falwell? He was a holy man.