@acontributor said:

The problem is that the companies that make all this crap they call movies and shows these days

The bloom is off the movie rose for you? That's kinda how I feel about sports - disillusioned by bad officiating, but still hanging around watching.

are all owned by the same people and they already have trillions of dollars. So it isn't about money anymore.

Well, not entirely not about money anymore. But the single project approach that producers take may give way to a more annual operations-approach that studios appear positioned to take.

It's about peddling propaganda.

If this is true, this sure isn't new!

You don't think how Indigenous people were portrayed in the heyday of the Western movie genre wasn't propaganda?

Or how about how women were portrayed as damsels needing rescue by heroic men? Or how about how those those heroes always seemed to be of just one certain type of man?

Or, hey, remember, in Independence Day when all the world's leaders were sitting around waiting for the Yoo-Ess-Ay to tell them how to take these bastards down? That wasn't some proper, American jingoist propaganda BS?

How about how Hollywood, as woke as it pretends to be, still pushes guns and violence as the solution to conflict - is that not some gun-nut propaganda?

I'm not saying your suspicion about media as propaganda isn't worth exploring - I'm saying, yes, explore it, but through a broader lens with more historic - and diverse - perspective.

@acontributor said:

Propaganda is nothing new.

Good, agreed.

So called fluoride, a known deadly toxic and radioactive waste,

Yep. I quit using fluoride toothpaste years ago. And I avoid drinking tap water in regions that fluoridate their water.

is now considered a good thing by most people because of decades old propaganda.

Agree, sad.

And propaganda has been used over and over again to get support for wars that are not in the public's best interest. So yeah. I agree with you.

Agree.

I just meant that they don't even care anymore if they alienate people with their message

Again, nothing new here - propagandists have never cared about alienating people. In fact, alienation was, partly, the point.

However, I'm not sure "alienation" is always bad - I mean, do we want affinity with evil? The problem is, free society is not on the same page as to what is evil, and what ought to, or ought not to be, alienated. For example, I think nazism, white supremacy, misogyny and white male hegemony are evil, but try to call these out and watch all the apologists flood the zone to argue that antifascists, cancel culture and wokeness are the real evils in today's society.

because they control all the studios.

You know, the funny thing here is, when a movie is produced that does not follow the mainstream, it's often panned (Suburbicon quickly comes to mind for me here). Thus, to get a message across, sometimes films have to go so deep into artistic allegory and symbolism that people, those same people who don't read much, are hard-pressed to interpret the films' deeper meanings (Edward Scissorhands and Forrest Gump pop into mind for me here). And, yeah, you bet I've commented on those movie boards with ideas and suggestions that rankled aplenty.

If we want to challenge the control of "they" who control all the studios, and their endless stream of propaganda, we ought to support non-conventional films that challenge our understanding of the world in which we live.

@acontributor said:

Keep in mind that the same people behind nazism and white supremacy are also behind wokeness and antifascism.

Debatable. You may be able to defend that argument, but I can't envision James Alex Fields and Heather Heyer willingly switching positions.

And everything for that matter. That's the paradigm shift that people need to make so that people can finally stop fighting each other.

I don't see how that fits the historical record at all. People who are attacked have a right to defend themselves, and defense is not equal to attack in terms of morality. Black Wall St. in Tulsa, OK was full of people minding their own business, raising and educating and providing for their families, when racists attacked them and burned their community down. You want to tell me those Black people who defended themselves are equally part of the problem? And, I do not mention Tulsa because it is the only available incident, just that it's, most unfortunately, one of the only ones that most people recognize. There are dozens more examples.

Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 is a great example that, "if y'all just follow the rules, everything will be okay" was total BS. Black elected officials did play the game according to the rules. What did white supremacists do about it? Flipped the game table, killed a bunch of people, burned down the community. Time and again, white supremacists proactively attacked Black people minding their own business. The fight against racism is, in my opinion, in NO WAY "equivalent" to racism itself.

Wilmington is just one more example among dozens. Memphis 1866. New Orleans 1866. Camilla 1868. St. Bernard 1868. Opelousas 1868. Colfax 1873. Vicksburg 1874. Eufaula 1874. Clinton 1875. Atlanta 1906. Springfield 1908. Slocum 1910. Nation-wide 1911. Newberry 1916. East St. Louis 1917. Elaine 1919. Washington DC 1919. Ocoee 1920. All of these before Tulsa 1921.

In my opinion, the paradigm shift people need to make is to better understand how these events shaped law, the courts, and society so that, while picnics and post cards from lynchings don't occur anymore, the values and morals that informed these times exist today, encoded and entrenched so deeply that its easy to say "things are not as bad as they were" (which is true) as well as "nah, that's not racism" (which, too often, is not true). The best cue is when laws are changed that encroach on those values and morals, racists and fascists lose their minds - because they know such changes are laying an ax at the root of the tree, far more threatening to their ideals that pruning leaves or even branches.

I'm against racism and fascism to be clear but am in no way associated with so called antiracism and antifascism which isn't anything of the sort even if most people involved are well meaning.

You lost me at "but". Again, the notion that the reactions of antiracism and antifascism is somehow equivalent to the proactions of racism and fascism is, to me, a false equivalence.

All that said, I started this thread to talk about how the movie industry is going to calculate profitability in the age of streaming. When you mentioned "propaganda", my reply accelerated us down a path of digression.

Maybe it's better to get back on track with the financial convo?

@acontributor said:

You may have heard how the Rockefeller family has bragged about creating feminism. They are some of the worst offenders. You may have also heard how George Soros funds all kinds of left wing stuff including BLM while having admitted to having no shame for his past. (When he was 14 he helped the Nazis round up Jews in Germany.) So that's what I mean when I say that literal white supremacists are behind stuff. I'm not saying that there aren't well meaning people who are antifascist or antiracist. But they are controlled and funded by people who just want to pit folks against each other and who are responsible for systemic racism, mainly because black people are an easy target as they don't give a shit about white people either.

Most antifacists are also marxist, socialist or communist which has killed hundreds of times more people than fascism. I'm not defending fascism but that's the pot calling the kettle black.

Interesting, - I appreciate what you're fleshing out.