Finicums Wake posted:

my life has been similarly derailed by the same mental health problems he has (anxiety leading to panic attacks) and i also had to move back in with my parents, so even when it's sad i find solace in it.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/WSWS_Updates/status/1140589549866934272

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

https://twitter.com/tarenceray/status/1140770560546430976?s=19

Top City Homo posted:

Top City Homo posted:

Top City Homo posted:

quote:

To shed light on all of these questions and more, Jacobin contributor Kevin Lin talked to a range of activists and scholars: Chris Chan, a sociologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a student and labor activist; Lam Chi Leung, a socialist in Hong Kong and a member of Left21; Chun-Wing Lee, a socialist, member of Left 21, and editor of The Owl, a left-wing website in Hong Kong; and Au Loong Yu, a writer and activist. Lin also solicited comments from Alexa, a Hong Kong-based activist, and the Student Labour Action Coalition, a distinctly left-wing group in a place with few of them.

quote:

Today anyone can be a temporary leader and call for radical actions without weighing the pros and cons. For instance, on June 11, certain small pro-independence localists called for “proportional violence against the government” and for people to break into the legislature and the government headquarters the next day to block the amendment bill from being introduced. Eventually hundreds of youngsters did try to break into the legislature on June 12, despite the fact that by then the legislature hall was empty, as there was no meeting at all. This was also the moment when the police began to fire rubber bullets, causing injuries.

R. Guyovich posted:

the hong kong federation of trade unions is the biggest labor organization in the city and supported the bill. wonder why jacobin didn't talk to them

quote:

Last week, HBO’s Chernobyl shot to the top of IMDb’s all-time TV rankings, outperforming other mega-popular hits like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and various stoner-friendly seasons of Planet Earth. And as of Tuesday, it had a 9.6-star (out of 10) average rating from more than 200,000 users on the Amazon-owned entertainment site. To the knee-jerk press, the limited series’ ascension was evidence of a historic hit. The Economist ran with the numbers, comparing them to traffic spikes on the “Chernobyl nuclear disaster” Wikipedia page, declaring the show “the highest-rated TV series ever,” and marveling at the reach of its subject matter...

The company is predictably secretive about how it determines its scores, but we do know a few things about how its ranking system is designed. The score of a movie does not reflect the mean of all user votes—rather, “various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it,” according to the IMDb website. But in its top ranking lists, the platform places more value on the votes of regular users than those of newbies. And a 2017 report in Mel Magazine found that those regular users often skew to an overwhelmingly male international audience between the ages of 18 and 29.

With this information, a pattern emerges. The internet’s go-to movie database is being shaped by a highly specific group of people with highly specific opinions and, quite frankly, a lot of free time. This problem is not unique to IMDb. Reference sites like Wikipedia are still struggling to diversify their voluntary staff which is overwhelmingly made up of white, male editors. Nor is this unique to online communities. The Academy Awards’ lack of diversity in both its voting body and award winners has been a recurring topic of conversation for the past few years. That Chernobyl has flourished under this system is not a surprise: It’s an excellent TV series, but also one that happens to have an all-white, mostly male cast, and a story line that appeals to exactly the kind of regular voters that IMDb prioritizes.

Frog Act posted:

I liked Cherynobyl but it quite clearly zigged into ideologically motivated soliloquies from time to time. it wasn’t even specifically historically inauthentic so much as deliberately structured to associate negative bureaucracy and self-serving avarice with Soviet governance which was both unnecessary and disingenuous

Frog Act posted:

I liked Cherynobyl but it quite clearly zigged into ideologically motivated soliloquies from time to time. it wasn’t even specifically historically inauthentic so much as deliberately structured to associate negative bureaucracy and self-serving avarice with Soviet governance which was both unnecessary and disingenuous

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The last episode is really bad and just packs in the narrative cliches like a squirrel getting ready to hibernate. Even with all the political stuff aside, it falls way short of being "the best show of all time."

Captain Billy Pissboy posted:

They really tried to play up the kgb as evil and scary but it fell flat. The worst thing the kgb guy did was... fire legasov for whistleblowing. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton suggested drone bombing Julian assange.

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

chernobyl was a really, really good show tbh. the few times it did veer a bit too much into political commentary were a bit embarrassing though

Frog Act posted:

there was a period both before and after WW2 where the Soviets channeled money into Weimar/West German film to produce Communist propaganda films that had actual narratives. I watched a bunch in a film class I took with an old leftist and they’re exactly the type of films I wish were still being made. they had an explicit, left-wing message while simultaneously being well-made and written films

my favorite example is “Mother Krause’s Journey Into Happiness” about living in the interwar Berlin slums

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

the worst moment to me was when the nuclear scientist lady poo poo on the party apparatchik for formerly working at a shoe factory or something

Mr. Lobe posted:

Can you direct me to a list of these kinds of films?