CBS: Hey let’s make a new Star Trek show and put women of color in the lead roles!
Star Trek fans: Oh! That sounds really cool!
Also CBS: Let’s put it on our overpriced streaming service so the fewest amount of people possible watch it
Star Trek fans:
This is the network that declared Sarah Shahi’s Nancy Drew ‘too female,’ then proceeded to present an all-male led lineup of shows.
Now it wants US audiences to pay for this privilege and, so you know, if you choose to do so, you’ll still have adverts running through it (unless you want to pay for a higher tier).
The conversations I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere suggest many fans are unhappy about this and do not want to pay the extra fee, when they are already paying for Netflix (who have the rights to stream the show abroad) or Hulu or whatever else.
I read a Salon article earlier that suggested CBS does want this show to succeed, else why give it a prime Sunday slot – but the author missed a point. That Sunday slot won’t be on their main (male-centric) network. It won’t be seen by this audience, unless they choose to pay for it – and who would choose to pay for stuff you get to see for free anyway, or is already available through a streaming service you already have?
Disney is planning something like this, too, and if everyone jumps on their individual streaming programme wagons, they will effectively lock out millions of potential viewers who cannot afford multiple services.
Once again, only the elite benefit.
It renders the hopeful, post-capitalist message of Star Trek completely useless.
This is not anti-Nicole Kidman but more of a spotlight on the ones in control of the Emmys. The ones who softly played off others, allowed Nicole to speak on to her liking with no orchestra to play her off, but then cut a historic moment and equally important speech with blaring music and a mic cut. Luckily, however, Sterling was able to finish his speech backstage [x].
These are the same people who allowed a known fascist mouthpiece onstage.
Guess it’s time to find a new brand of inexpensive conditioner; Garnier, being a subsidiary of L’Oreal, has gone and lost my business. Because Ms. Bergdorf spoke nothing but truth and is an Icon™.
All my white followers, hear me out on this: For one, even the best among white people (you, with the pointed exception of any creepy hatefollowers I haven’t blocked yet) have to unlearn
casual racism…and doing so is a lifelong, ongoing project, because it’s
inherent in the system. And, to be blunt: most white people don’t bother to unlearn it; it’s easier to be complicit than uncomfortable, after all.
And for another? She was fucking talking about Charlottesville. You know, where actual racists killed someone for standing up to them; and their Apologist-In-Chief tried to front like everyone was to blame? But clearly, the black trans lady who said “you’re all complicit, and most of you don’t even try not to be” is the real bigot here. Keep telling yourself that.
Anyway:
L’Oreal talks a big game about promoting diversity; even as they fire
and denounce a model for calling out bullshit when she smelled it, off of company time…and even as they manufacture skin-lightening products. So…I
guess that chief among the “values” they were talking about must be unmitigated hypocrisy.
And no—do not try to talk to me about how she shouldn’t have “gotten political” or whatever. Skin bleach is not apolitical; and neither—if mainly because we live in a society where skin bleach is seen as apolitical—is committing oneself to diversity. They’d have known when they hired Ms. Bergdorf that she wasn’t
going to just stand around and be decorative; they still fired her
for reasons that add up to “being an Angry Black Woman.” (And not
even on company time, either.)
I love how performative wokeness on the internet has taken the concept of cultural appropriation from being about exploiting, harming, and/or misrepresenting societies, and bastardized it into this white nationalist style bullshit about “culture is about tradition and heritage and family n and is never ever ever ever to be shared or mixed in any way, even respectfully, because mixing muddies and destroys pristine cultures, which are only truly authentic if they are quarantined away from any outside influence or people.” Seriously, Richard Spencer himself has said that he likes this shit, because it’s “racial consciousnesses" for sjw cucks. Also, this bastardization of the concept does fuck all to actually, you know, help communities who are affected by actual appropriation.
But hey, as long as you win that sweet sweet #woke cred for screeching up and down on Twitter and Tumblr because some teenager wore a yukata that their host family in Japan gave them as a gift, or getting into slapfights about whether or not flower crowns are cultural appropriation (and if so, then from which culture!?) then it’s totally worth it!
“Seriously, Richard Spencer himself has said that he likes this shit, because it’s “racial consciousnesses” for sjw cucks.“
I will reblog this every fucking time I see it on my dash.
Seriously, guys, it’s disrespectful to refuse to participate in someone else’s cultural activities due to fear that some other person who isn’t a member of their culture is going to come along and yell about appropriation.
Yes, you can wear that yukata or sari that your friend gave you or urged you to buy, at appropriate times, and yes you can take selfies if photos are not forbidden at the event. No, you do not have to show up to events in jeans inappropriate western clothing just to avoid offending a complete stranger on the internet who isn’t part of the culture you’re visiting.
Yes, you can buy jewelry and accessories made by individuals in their traditional styles that they make and sell in order to support themselves and their communities. And you can talk them up to your friends, too. People literally need to make a living, and this is way better than corporations stealing their designs and works for mass cheap production. Members of the community generally won’t sell you anything that’s truly sacred and not meant for outsiders.
Yes, you can learn the theater, dance, and other arts of a culture if you are invited to do so. Refusing a personal invitation is rude. Yes, the person inviting you knows you have no idea what you’re doing. (A school program is an invitation, by virtue of it being offered.)
Yes, you can accept thank you gifts that are from the culture of the giver and display them to show your appreciation. To expect thank you gifts to be limited to your own cultural heritage is inappropriate. Depending on the culture, hiding gifts away in a box may be rude as well.
Yes, you can learn languages. Please do.
Yes, you can eat food that is served to you, and if someone offers to teach you to cook it, you can learn that.
Yes, you can watch movies or tv, listen to music, and generally enjoy the arts that a culture has developed, while recognizing that this doesn’t make you an expert on that culture.
Be respectful, be polite, be humble. You’re not an authority because you did something once or watched some tv, so don’t claim that. But also don’t let people shame you for being curious about the world and accepting and open to the people in it.
There is a world of difference between “Yes, I will happily join you in this, since you offered” and “This is mine now.”
Saying to someone who is attempting to share their culture with you that you won’t participate because you think it would be appropriation is just another way of taking control of their culture away from them. If you really truly don’t want to participate, do it for your sake, not for what you have decided is their sake.
Sharing my culture with friends is part of how I maintain my cultural identity in isolation. Participating in the culture of my adopted home is part of how I find and maintain my place in the local community. These things are also true for Bae, and I don’t doubt true for many others.
To prevent us from sharing our cultures as we see fit is to deny us freedom to openly express our cultural identities. To prevent us from participating in our host culture is to segregate and exclude us.
It really is just about listening to the people who are part of that culture. If they say ‘here, let’s share’ then share! If they say ‘please don’t’, then don’t. It’s literally that easy.
Cis men, both men of color and white men, seem to be the ones most keenly aware of how bad call-out culture is for our world. So eager to educate us all. Which seems strangely aligned with the fact that they are often the ones being called out.
I can say this. Calling people out is uncomfortable. It isn’t something that should be taken lightly. It does not bring me joy. I don’t think it is a solution for everything, but I do think that is is a perfectly rational, logical response to a culture that is still more likely to call a woman a whore than a man a rapist.
But the lesson to take away from the SoundCloud crisis isn’t just that creative businesses are difficult to sustain online, or that the company wasn’t quick enough to find a lasting revenue stream. It’s that as we move creative scenes from cities and neighborhoods and onto the web, we outsource the publishing, storage, and archiving of their products to young, for-profit businesses — and therefore run the very serious risk of losing huge and important libraries of culture to the vagaries of a new and quickly moving economy.
Thinking about SoundCloud it’s hard not to be reminded of Vine, the hugely influential video-sharing app that was unceremoniously shut down by Twitter last year: Not only did the web lose one of its most vibrant spaces, any videos that disappeared from the service were gone forever. It’s not an accident, either, that, like Vine, SoundCloud’s culture is primarily steered by non-white contributors.
I feel like a lot of the stuff we do with the internet makes more sense as a utility since there really isn’t a profit-model for it.
Like, Uber/Lyft -using the internet to find Taxis on-demand- is a great idea, but neither company is profitable, and their business plan is literally to float by burning investment capital to cover their operating losses in the hopes of eventually achieving a global monopoly position in taxi services, which they can then abuse by jacking up ride rates and crushing driver-payments monstrously to manipulate the business into being profitable. This is Stupid as a business plan -and predicated on eventually establishing an unfree market ruled by illegal behavior so philosophically and legally contradictory as well(not that any of this matters to the Business Class)- but as a public one, run off of publicly owned servers and accessible to everyone who goes through the classes and pays the fees to be qualified as a taxi driver, it’d be a great idea; it wouldn’t even need to be entirely tax-funded, you could tack a surcharge onto rides found through the service, or require a usage fee from operators, which would go to maintaining it.
Same with Vine or SoundCloud or Youtube or Amazon or Search Engines or just the internet in general, really. All of these are great ideas, all of them are super-useful, and all of them are either damndably difficult to profitize, or their utility is undermined by profitizing them(Google and data-mining, for instance. Also questionably legal, regardless of the pragmatist decisions handed down by pro-business US courts), or they can only be profitable via illegal operation(Amazon, for instance, runs on monopoly-power and violating labor laws, and much of its operating costs are actually carried by its “last mile” vendor, the US Postal Service. Which is to say: Taxpayers). The Internet, and it’s various uses, are clearly Public Goods, and they ought to be publicly owned and maintained like any public good, and they would be, if they hadn’t been invented(by various government research projects, let’s remember) during a time when “Privatization” was all the rage in political circles as a result of Conservatives realizing they could hijack the socially-taught racism of white voters post Civil Rights Era to undermine support for government action and regulated capitalism in Eurostates(or Post-Colonial-Immigration Era in Britain. Thatcher’s election had a hell of a lot more to do with white Brits pissed off about Caribbean and Indian neighbors than any sincere preference for laissez faire economic philosophies within the electorate).
The Doctor Is Out 