Drivebyhaiku @ Drivebyhaiku @lemmy.world

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More or less because the blanks give a more realistic recoil and the smoke whisps which saves on time and processing in post and you can see if the action works in real time on review.. and there are arguements that handling the real deal does actually add to the performance...

But like the standard done properly makes it incredibly difficult for injuries from weapons to occur. Consider that in 30 years the gun deaths in film plunged to almost zero *. There is way more production out there then there used to be and every scene where you see a gun being fired that is usually not one take and those takes were repeated over and over again. That's tens of thousands of safe handles over the years.

I don't have any issues with sets having or deciding to not have real guns but the real thing is that on a set that is doing the standard every weapon from barely looking like a gun at all rubber replica to projectiless gas powered airsoft gun are all treated as though they were real. When they are handed over you have to be shown exactly what they are and replica or not they can never be left unsupervised. They are always in authorized hands or locked up.

It's part of why this case is so important. Anyone with money can make a non-union film. The best practices transcend union borders because accidents made from cupidity and negligence should have consequences. You ignore the warnings then the consequences are yours. The discourse often frames this as a personal issue but it's a systemic one. Showing producers that being safe is a sometimes food is a dangerous precedent because the power they have over people is no joke.

• (if you exempt the guy who ended up blowing his brains out with a company weapon because he was playing around. These days the spiel actors get include the phrase "the force of blanks can still be deadly, keep clear of the muzzle and don't ever directly point them at another person at short range. )

It be like that. As a person with my first decade of union/non union film now under my belt and trying for the shop steward program I find it really difficult to convey to people just how stunningly bad the praxis on the Rust set appears from an insider perspective. It's really difficult because people don't understand how regimented the safety protocols in film are and how ubiquitous certain ones really are. It's also hard for people to really grock power dynamics on a set. Like there have been people who have been banished instantly from set for being in an actor of Baldwin's power positions eyeline. Any regular crew would have risked their jobs to try and appeal directly to Baldwin to be safer and this was the year after film was halted for upwards of 8 months due to covid and was slow to come back. There were a lot of desperate people in film trying to make back the debts they incurred by the unexpected famine.

People have been sentanced to prison on manslaughter charges in film for a lot less than what happened on Rust.

For context another manslaughter charge that stuck in film is the case of Sarah Jones who was run down by a train trying to rescue equipment off a tressle track that the company wasn't properly cleared to work on. Three people took the hit in that case. Two out of three Executive Producers and the First Assistant Director (a position that serves as the on set safety veto) were charged and received prison sentences in that case.

It is also known that the Rust production had fielded massive concerns from crew regarding gun safety on set in the days before the accident when Baldwin's stunt double fired two live rounds from a firearm that was not properly checked or cleared and called "cold" on handoff. He just didn't hit anybody.

This production literally had a full dry run of the fatal incident with Baldwin's stunt double. Everything from the handoff to the call of "cold gun" was duplicated on the day of the fatal event. That the Stunt double incident didn't cause a full stop and inquiry with a massive change of protocols to the industry's best practice Brandon Lee standard is utterly baffling. The whole situation really is a rare and particularly damning senario of extreme negligence on behalf of production and when the negligence pie gets that big it will surprise you who gets a slice.

Actually... Both. In regular Firearm handoff protocols Actors have a responsibility to uphold on their end. If everything is done to spec it is impossible to fire a live round from a firearm. Some small obstruction in the barrel getting missed and propelled might be in the realm of reasonable but part of the process of handoff requires a mini briefing on handoff of the weapon where each round is checked over where the actor can see and only authorized people are allowed to handle weapons at all. Been standard since the Brandon Lee death on "The Crow".

Baldwin took the gun from a person on set whom everyone would have known wasn't supposed to be handling it and didn't insist on a check. In our industry actors are briefed every time they accept a role that it is their partial responsibility to make sure those checks are done because it is not just a safety thing, it's a liability issue if you harm someone. If a check is missed as an actor you are supposed to flag it and refuse the unsafe handoff to clear you of any potential liability or after the fact regrets...

Thing is this protocol has ever been throughly tested in a court setting. The last time anyone was killed by a bullet on a set was the cause of the massive change to the industry standard protocol in a mass concerted effort to do a "never again" style pledge which basically worked for 30 years straight. The other notable gun death was an actor who killed himself with a blank by pointing the gun at his own noggin and pulling the trigger which which was something he was expressly not supposed to do for a scene, he just did it on his own without anybody's sign off.

This industry sea change in part is designed to exonerate Productions from negligence charges like what happened on The Crow but it also made it one of the most well respected industry protocols as the Lee death basically became one of the industry's cautionary tale that lingers being retold to each new generation of crew. While non-union sets tend to be less regimented it is known fact that concerns of gun safety issues were already flagged and bought to production by the concerned Rust crew and no motion was made to change. Potentially Baldwin as part of a group may have directly ignored further appeals to firearm related safety prior to the shooting. This isn't the Brandon Lee situation over again - the industry now is a whole new ball game.

(Edit : Forgot to mention that the Rust crew had almost a full beat for beat dry run of the incident a few days before the incident where Baldwin's stunt double discharged two live rounds after being handed a gun that he was told was "cold"... How one ignores that kind of wake up call I'll never know.)

I don't really have the issue of using power over others. At some level Hierarchy is efficient which is why a lot of Democratic structures have in built heirachy to address speedy action...

But there's more nuance in what's going on in Dune. Fremen are kind of Bedouin / Islamic / Haudenosaunee confederation coded. On the one hand you have the tropes around the Confederacy, fierce warrior culture, connecting to the land, noble Democratic society and then you have the Islamic religious belief system represented in the cult of Paul basically becoming something analogous to the Prophet Muhammad. Both of the cultural trope bodies come from places that have dealt with Colonial occupation. There are aspects we are meant to see as noble and admirable. We see through Paul's eyes as he witnesses injustices and gains an appreciation of the culture which adopts him. There is a long history in the west of Romantization of indigenous peoples. Benevolent racism is still racism though. We follow Paul so we see as he does but the narrative framework doesn't always match what Paul does. His ability to understand the grand weight of his actions puts him beyond normal human senses of scope. When he behaves in ways based on personal sentimentality Prescience essentially pops up in the corner of the screen and says "The world will Remember this."

The frame always pops back up to tell us that by sympathizing Paul is going to cause a massive war. He is the fulcrum which the universe balances on and it is his choice whether he causes a massacre of incredible proportions. He's coded as morally principled- A good man maybe but also the narritive paints weak, unable and unwilling to stop the rising tide because his alliegences are ultimately to the indigenous peoples. He cannot get ahead of the war because the people beneath him of that indigenous culture will never be satisfied with peaceful emancipation but enact instead a holy war. Others must suffer for the Fremen of Dune to be self determining. The deaths of billions rests on the nessisary exploitation of Dune's spice resources the same way the world relies on oil. The deaths of billions is always cast as the inevitable consequence which is the main problem I think.

Take this back to it's roots and you see some of the regular pushback you see against civil rights movements. The idea that people fighting for rights or emancipation are instead just looking to turn around and subjugate others. That it must enevitably come down to a war where someone replaces the old form of subjugation with a new format. The jihad is this idea codified. Paul's actions are often framed as ultimately bad in the story but he fills the role of the person both enchanted by and betrayed by romanitic exotisism.

The story seems to be of someone who sympathizes with indigenous plight but also legitimizes the need for it. Paul is a tragic figure because he is given no third option. The story isn't interested in exploring any positive potential outcomes. It's a seesaw where the pain always lands on someone not in reasonable concessions but all or nothing battles. This is where the idea of Dune being an anti-colonization narrative starts to get very shakey.

I don't know if this was a struggle internal to the author that he was working through in real time as he wrote it, , if we are supposed to see the points of both Paul and the Framework as legitimate or if we are ultimately supposed to conclude that Paul was ultimately misguided... Of those two options both are problematic in multiple ways. In the Framework and Paul are right model you have essentially "what's done is done" Colonial apologism. If Paul is ultimately supposed to misguided by sentiment that's basically the plot saying "Do not sympathize it will only lead to the bad stuff happening". The Fremen can never be stopped from worshipping Paul as saviour and moral guide and the resulting massacre is his reward.

This narrative ignores the idea there are a range of different potential options to deconstructed colonization which are based on different peaceful reconciliation measures that are admittedly less narratively interesting than a winner takes all war. These are based on the appeals to seeing pluralist takes where compromise and actual respect is the work of non-romantic empathy. Different places are currently handling it differently...but that's not really what Dune seems to consider. It's structured so that at all times you know as a reader for certain that Paul's actions and particularly his bleeding heart sentiments will cause death on a scale far beyond Arrakis. It seems mired with ruminations more in line with Utilitarian ethics trolley problem situations which paints Paul as an ultimately divisive figure. The main issue is that it's using themes of indigenous emancipation to ask these questions which have fairly direct and poorly concealed real world counterparts. Precience exists to force the framework as emancipation as only choosing who is ultimately the worthiest of violence or what is ultimately worth sacrificing because of personal sentimental attachments.

It is what the author wrote but it's basically like saying Winnie the Pooh has themes of childhood innocence... Yes. It does, sure, but would you bother writing an essay on it? Deeper reads of the text give you a lot more subtext. Like for instance how the plight of the Fremen and the spice trades mirror the political situations in the Midde East, Atraidies and Harkonnen are rips of Greek and Finnish names with many of the main offworld characters having Biblical (Hebrew or Roman) names while Fremen are specifically sort of coded as Bedouin /Islamic Zen Buddhist mashups and sometimes they straight up speak Arabic. So the offworld Empire gets kind of "Western Civilization" coded and the desire for emancipation is taken over by an inevitable religious fanatism caused by essentially an offworld sympathizer who is the result of hundreds of years of Eugenics becoming a messiah figure basically being a better indigenous people then the indigenous people who are ultimately pawns in a female lead conspiracy that fucked up because of one woman's choice to have actual reproductive autonomy...

Dune's got a lot subtextually going on worth talking about but "Tough conditions tough people" isn't what I find interesting about the story. I get that from a lot of places so it doesn't feel particularly unique or special to the story.

I mean yes, but that's a bit of a surface level read and I would argue more of a trope than a theme. Like there's a lot of fantasy where there is a scarcity based culture that makes for skilled people with very survival forward approaches to things normally governed by sentimental attachments that paint kindness as a privilege of those with resources to spare...

Those conditions in fictional tropes pre 1960's were just more often than not just temporary generational stuff. Famine, war, extreme poverty and so on were popular places to draw touch characters from but the sci-fi boom just elaborated it into death worlds where things are always horrible as a matter of a more overarching environmental nature. People have otherwise been on their box about the effects of soft living on moral character since as long as the written word has existed.

I dunno if it's nessisarily subverting the Foreign messiah trope either particularly.

In parable there's a lot of overlap with the white messionic saviour trope just the indigenous peoples are obscured by sci-fi. The Fremen are depicted sort of as braves of the "noble savage" variety having an innate connection to the land in the form of their connections to sandworms, walking without rhythm etc and are visually othered blue by spice. Paul learns things about himself by their adoption and ultimately rises up through their ranks to lead them, takes a concubine in their ranks who represents his "love" but ultimately marries and legitimizes his connection to an offworld Princess. The Muslim/Islamic coding doesn't particularly help matters. The whole Sandworm thing is coded to bring to mind oil drilling. Uplifting the Fremen society is also not without consequence - doing so is destined to perpetuate a massive out of control religiously motivated slaughter across the universe... Which is not so great. Smacks a little of replacement narratives which puts emancipation always at someone's expense of being just replaced on a heirachy. Even the names Atraidies is Greek coded and Harkonnen is ripped from Finnish making the houses kind of White coded, particularly since the whole "Western Civilization" thing is often coded as the legacy of the Greeks and Romans (its part of why important government buildings basically are built to resemble faux Greek temples).

Paul also gets his powers basically from a Eugenics based breeding program which more or less legitimizes that process.

So while many look at Dune as a subversion of colonial tropes the framework that paints Paul as a devisive figure also sort of hinges on this idea of him being a good spirited race traitor who manages to become more Fremen than the Fremen whose fall from grace inevitably sparks the downfall and replacement of the (Western coded) civilization he comes from killing billions...

I recognize generally the instinct is to go with the kindest spirited read about these things which I can't slam anyone for. I don't think good faith readings aren't nessisarily a moral failure, it's human to want to extend the benefit of the doubt, it's just critique is evolving to see things more pluristically. People like what they like and this particular author isn't exactly reaping any benefits of influence, he died almost 40 years ago. People are gunna reintegrate his work to try and adapt it to modern attitudes just like they do with things like Tarzan, Lovecraft and Dances with Wolves. There is however a kernel of supremacy in the work, unwittingly placed or not (I haven't looked into the personal deets of the author's beliefs and maybe it's better that way) that is a product of the compounding and normalization of other like works that we are growing up to see weren't particularly good for everyone.

Maybe however my particularly harsh read is an extrapolation of my own background. I am a West Coast Canadian. We are encouraging ourselves as a society to have a really hard think about indigenous affairs and attitudes. Like its pretty normal where I am for all events, meetings and performances to be preceeded by a Land Acknowledgement and a lot of my friends in acedemia and the arts world are actively trying to fully subvert, credit or recognize and append this stuff so we can start dismantling the structures we're all unwittingly complicit in. I have buddies from the States who are pretty leftist who are just entirely mystified by the depth and breadth of the process. Yet I am no angel. I love the Anno series of video games which very uncritically depicts a very sanitized version European expansion and capitalist Empire. I watch and enjoy anime that routinely has aspects which are often ridiculously sexist in treating women more like beloved pets than people. I think Miyazaki was right about anime while still enjoying the fruits of that industry. So I am not gunna say "We should spurn Dune once and for all!" but like... I also think we can learn from it and not let it entirely off the hook.

I feel like that's a pretty well thought out theoretical! Will admit to still not having seen the new Dune movie so mostly going by the book.

I don't know if I explicitly ever read into Dune that particular "Dark Side" interpretation of the Duel before as since it is so solidly from Paul's perspective it seemed to be painted in terms of something nessisary to survive further and thus more like a morally neutral painted thing. A loss of innocence for sure but not nessisarily any more so than other fantasy protagonist who took the same sort of step of killing for the first time. He wasn't granted much autonomy to completely peaceful exit the situation by Jamis so his options were more or less try and kill or cement his one likely route to survival. With the "locking in fate" thing painting his choice to die in the duel rather than kill as maybe for the greater good for nebulous wibbly wobbly timey wimey reasons.

It almost felt to me since the books were so bloody weird with plot points shooting the moon (though after awhile more like jumping the shark in personal opinion) and the factor of such grand prescience weakened a lot of the moral picture of any grand themes of Paul becoming an absolute monster as he's got such a solid "greater good" he's working towards that doesn't really have theoreticals?

Like okay, Paul sees literally everything that will happen from the arrayed options so his demise is always placed as being stopping a series of dominoes from falling by plucking the first one to fall out of the lineup... but those grand losses are almost always impersonal. He at the same time is a human with human desires for personal safety for him and his loved ones which doesn't place him as nessisarily "bad" just kind of instinctively alive. The plot always frames this as ultimately selfish but really only from the perspective of having a complete and total knowledge of how everything single action is going to eventually play out. It's eclipsing human moral frameworks by this bizzare aspect of sizing it up to a Godlike scale. Paul can make a "good choice" as essentially a God working on that scale of knowledge or a "bad choice" as singular human with a bias towards survival. While an interesting hypothetical I think that removes him strictly from the territory as being at all relatable on a moral scale to a conventional ethical paradigm. Like for all Paul's prescience he is limited in his ability to affect the board state so a lot of what happens is painted as his fault because of a choice he makes but if you look at the choices made where he really sort of fucks the dog on a God-like scale it's generally for reasons which make him relatable as a person.

Absolute power corrupting absolutely or later themes that people really need to not think too collectively and not create cults stikes me as not being Paul's downside. He didn't ask for the power he has to be dropped into his lap and can never fully get ahead of the consequences of having that power so I don't think Paul is painted as being a complete subversion of being a self insert turned bad guy so much as being a " tragic hero Chosen One" just being a hell on earth situation that he needs to weather with highs and personal lows. The framing sort of struck me as a fairly typical compounding trauma storyline where all the terrible things that happen to him make him more "heroic".

This is all sort of personal opinion though. I feel like I don't exactly love the Dune universe. My reading of them was largely because while I was staying in Japanese guesthouses I tended to read whatever English novels were left behind by previous occupants.

I only read the books so the movie may have course corrected somewhat to make that clearer. I feel like in the books it was a little bit like greek tragedy but Paul gets the "shades of grey" treatment for much longer than he deserves.

I have to admit a bias though that since the books kind of go off the rails pretty quickly I tend to prefer to look at Dune as a stand alone work strictly from an enjoyment standpoint.

I would say Dune (at least the first book before it goes really fucking weird) has a sort of anti-colonial, indigenous(ish) peoples under occupation themes that Star Wars just isn't interested in exploring. With Star Wars it's basically just "There's an evil empire, okay that's enough, let's go" vibes to OG Star Wars. Like you don't have to pay attention to the political background blurb at the beginning that serves as pasting a veneer of political intrigue at all and the story basically makes sense. It's a War story, whether or not a Monarchy is involved barely matters. It could be "Ambassador Leia" and "President Palpatine" and basically nothing would functionally change. Empire requires no monarchs to function.

Dune does come across as "The Indigenous peoples of Dune hadn't a hope until this one random outsider self insert character showed up and joined their cause and was amazing at everything and was lifted up as saviour because vague prophecy seeded by generations of matriarchal Jedi (Bene Gesserit) manipulation reasons..." It's sympathetic to indigenous peoples in a vaguely problematic for a host of familiar reasons kind of way. Like the world building is great and all but I feel like you could swap Luke Skywalker and Paul Atreidies and end up with a generally better story on both counts.

Competitive sports aren't really the point I am trying to make here. A lot of women out there really seem to give up before they try or guys treat them automatically like they can't do things and ask other guys long before they ask for an AFAB person's help. These days I work in mixed crews and there is this constant assumption /surprise thing guys have and their minds are very easily blown when they see women lifting things that are way below their true ability. Some women by contrast internalize that "I am weak and always will be" message and treat lifting anything over 50lbs as completely impossible until they see other women doing it. It's like there's an internalized assumption all around of weakness being an inherent trait and AFAB people who do not fit that stereotype constantly have to reprove themselves over and over again to every new person who shows up.

I feel like we as a culture do not appreciate the raw physical potential of women. The whole "weaker sex" propaganda was way too successful. Like people have no idea what laundry actually used to entail. I am a history enthusiast and I got ropped into a recreation of a full Tudor washday for an Arts and Sciences competition in the SCA. Like I was working as a concrete former lifting and tying rebar for my job at the time and was stronger than about 70 percent of the folks in my group... But Holy fuck my muscles BURNED from weilding a paddle. Not just stirring but beating clothes with something like a cricket bat and then wringing bedsheets by winding them around posts. By the end of the day I was absolutely done in.

I was given an amazing cheesecake for my trouble in helping out for the task but the real take away was an appreciation for the washing machine that I will never forget.

Well everyone should probably be hitting the gym from time to time these days since activity in general has become kind of optional. Going as a couple can make for the best gym partners. Me and my partner have a good time.

Women are generally pretty capable of lifting twice their weight. Stand back to back and link arms (you may need to crouch) and if she leans forward and you tense your core and lift your legs you will end up directly over her center of gravity. It's essentially her lifting you like a backack. It isn't a super comfortable lift for the guy in the equation if he's got a weak core but we used to do this all the time at fight night. A teen girl who is maybe 120lbs soaking wet can easily pick up a 6'5 215lbs guy and walk down a city block with him on her back.

In period women were generally muscled as fuck. Fetching household water, hand milling grain for bread and doing laundry were female coded tasks on top of doing whatever yearly hard labour tasks were required. They would absolutely be trucking their favourite guy out of town even if he was big.

I believe what you are referring to is Communism. Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work that by your own admission is made up of a number of different writers on the subject just as the elaborations on Newtonian Physics is considered also a part but not whole of Classical Mechanics.

The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others. Very often on this platform I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist simply because he simply coined a term to a body of thought that predated him and extended far beyond him so why should I extend to Marx the authorial intent by the political realm of thought baring his name? If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?

If you are saying gender equality is Marxist then I am guessing you haven't read much Marx friend. Marx was very about women being relegated to traditional gender roles and was more about whole "seperate spheres of excellence" thing. You are thinking more of the likes of Saint Simone and Robert Owen's Owenites.

Feminist scholarship has tried to adapt Marx by stripping out the veiws about women and applying his rhetoric more unilaterally but that's not his text and quite frankly there are other contemporary philosophers and movement leaders which did it better.

There is this habit to slap the name Marxist on a the most idealized reads of the work and call it his because he's the name people know and the few well known political labels on the far left or because people who have claimed the label of his movement after his death decided to non-canonically add to his work- but I personally wish that people could normalize other schools of leftist philosophy and not treat Marx particularly as the magnet that all of us will inevitably be drawn to or attribute stuff to him that he doesn't particularly deserve. Marxism as a sort of brand name philosophy is misleading and disappointing to those who read his work and find that their ideals aren't actually well represented there.

(This is me being glib) It depends on what kind of bear we're talking about. Blackbear be big noisy and confusing, grizzly play dead, big hairy gay guy like best case scenario.

I will say that there is a marked and growing distain for mixed liberal ideologies. There is a lot of this idea that every socialist needs to be some kind of pure strain to count or take basically the Marxist definition as the only viable one. It kind of ignores a couple of centuries of Socialist thought. A lot of people basically think "means of production" means nothing less than everyone working in a co-op and discounts a lot of past socialist wins as "not socialism". It's an important thing to remember about Marx, the world he lived in was very different. Damn near everything at the time was privatized. Water, sanitation, post, fire service, public health and public health regulatory bodies... None of that existed under the perview of Government auspice. Socialist strains more to the legacy of Robert Owens, Daniel De Leon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other ethical socialists have had significant wins. Some places took it further than others but the one thing that was allowed to happen in a lot of places was complacency. The 1980's and 90's created a liberal fervor that has continued to walk back a lot of significant wins made by the Socialist movements of the early 1900's and the civil rights movements... But because a lot of the functions of Socialist wins have become the air we breathe people do not associate them with socialism anymore. The issue with peaceful integration is that private gains are always incentivized so complacency cannot be afforded.

It seems weirdly controversial but Non-Marxist socialists exist. Marx was one very popular voice in a sea of people with somewhat related but sometimes contradictory ideas. Some philosophers have been retro-branded as proto-socialists because they existed before Marx who just coined the term. Looking at his contemporaries there's good reason why he became popular. A lot of what was out there was much drier, committed to peaceful reform. It didn't tap into people's anger or emotion in the same way. Right now we deal with a lot of that issue on the left. It is an old struggle. People who are bombastically angry and turning around and biting people for not being "enough" of something. Not fitting a narrow definition. Half my issue with Communist parties I have looked at joining is they aren't great at being collaborative. Increasingly I have found the argument around "centrism" to stop meaning "people who support the basic status quo" which it seemed to have evolved to being interpretable as for a minute... To a more worrying definition about anyone willing to work across any ideological lines set down by the one guy people bothered to read.

This use of "centrism" as though it's a plotable point on a map seems to me a worrying fiction. The post moves to create division and self satisfaction where none need exist.

Absolutely LUDICROUS, they always try and walk it in.