Brain Dead Morons Award 'The Martian' Golden Globes As A "Comedy"

Question; There is a science fiction film from 2015 in which an astronaut becomes abandoned on Mars after a monster dust storm. However, he manages to locate the left behind base of operations and use enough ingenuity to survive - by hydroponics - and staving off one mini-disaster after another. The movie ('The Martian') starring Matt Damon, was gripping as the astronaut faced each new crisis until eventually rescued.

Was this a comedy?

Not at all, not in a million years! It was a high profile drama of one astronaut's fight for survival on a hostile planet. Taking all it had to give and persevering by his own ingenuity. The film, based on a book by the same name, was a stirring testament to human survival in the face of insurmountable odds - and for that reason doesn't merit being downgraded and debased as "comedic".

So, how in the hell could it receive two Golden Globes as a comedy? Do the people awarding the prize even know the difference between a comedy and a drama? Did they even see the movie? Or, do they have their brains in their asses and simply confused the film with the 1960s comedy, 'My Favorite Martian'? Inquiring minds really want to know.

My theory is the Golden Globe awarders treated the film not as what it literally presented on screen (life or death drama) but as a "Poe".   For those who are blissfully unaware of the meaning of Poe, we have this,  according to the word gurus at Wikipedia :

"Poe's Law was originally formulated by Nathan Poe in August 2005.[2] The law emerged at the Creation & Evolution forum on the website Christianforums.com.[3] Like most such places, it had seen a large number of creationist parody postings and these parody posts were usually followed by at least one user starting a flame war (a series of angry and offensive personal attacks) thinking it was a real post. Nathan Poe summarized this pattern in his original formulation of the law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article. "

And subsequently (ibid.):

"However, the usage of the law has grown, and now the term "Poe" is almost synonymous with any parody on the internet. "

So, in other words, the Golden Globe folks came to perceive 'The Martian' not as the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars and fighting for survival, but as a parody of that -hence a "Poe"  And if it was a Poe, hell, it could as well be a comedy! But their thinking is misplaced, irrational as well as ignorant and I trace it to the gradual absorption and undermining of thought processes by the nation's preoccupation with the net and especially social media.

Hence, that the movie was not a "Poe" (or comedy) ought to be patently obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense and intellect. I trace this back to the "Facebook" effect, and the counterfactual nature of web reality itself which is now infecting millions of brains, mainly those of the young -say between 17- 29- putting them through multiple hysteresis loops toward an ultimate dumb down.

Much of this brain degeneration has already been dealt with by author Mark Bauerlein in his The Dumbest Generation. In his book he depressingly documents how the under-30 crowd are foregoing knowledge-based maturity to wallow in a self-confected, solipsistic, social mirror world of their own egos and selves. The fallout includes their not even meeting basic standards of knowledge for employment, far less earning a degree that actually means anything.

One dire consequence as regards higher level analysis and thinking (of which the "Poe" syndrome is an imitator): A delimited reality is confected via over-exposure which deliberately excludes the harsh outside world, and confines the personalized reality to chirpy “how r ya’s”, or gossip, mainly in deformed English which Bauerlein ranks just above the reading level of pre-school children’s books (determined by the median frequency of rare or difficult words per 1000 – with print newspapers at the top with 68.3 and pre-school books at 16.3)

The entire mental superstructure was revealed in the words of one 16 year old girl quoted (p. 137-38) when asked by a journalist if she wasn’t worried that she was denied a broader picture. Her illuminating retort: “I’m not trying to get a broader picture, I’m trying to get what I want”.

Out of the mouths of “babes”! But are we really helping to engender a generation of über-dumpkopfs? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least the Twitter-Facebook obsession (compulsion?) may be contributing to the emergence of a generation of pseudo-intellectual Babbits governed by their own opinions, supported by very little factual basis.

In this context, the awards presented to 'The Martian' as a comedy probably make perfect sense, in a twisted logic way.

At least one tweet in the wake of the show was from a woman (Sady Doyle):

"It is a bold and exciting move to deem "The Martian" a comedy but I think all our efforts to avoid dying alone are essentially comic, so"

Actually, Sady, it is a hopelessly dumb move to do so. And if this is the case I can see the time soon coming when most of our brain-debased young "netizens" will soon find comedy in homeless children dropping dead from hunger or diseases. Which is sure to make all the Repukes happy!

And btw, the efforts of humans to "avoid dying alone" are emphatically not "comedic", but again this likely shows how brains have been gutted by PR, propaganda and false Poe perceptions.

The Case for the "Ugly Selfie" And Why Meryl Davis Probably Shouldn't Do Selfies

A new indie film that emerged at the Sundance Film Festival last month was entitled "Selfie". It featured 18 teenaged girls who were asked to capture (during a 1-day workshop) the physical imperfections they'd normally try to hide - say if they were taking a selfie to send off to a friend. The images included accentuation of their double chins, freckles, upper arms, and pimples. Cynthia Wade, the film maker, said the point was to start a conversation about cultural beauty standards. and self-esteem.

According to Ms. Wade, quoted in The NY Times (Feb 23, p. 12-ST):

"We spend so much time trying to hide our flaws because the culture has set it up that you have to be ashamed if you're not perfect. I think girls are tired of it. They're suddenly much more willing to embrace the ugly or ironic."

In this context, it is natural for cute or pretty girls to rebel from the image dictators and strike back, often with the deliberately ugly selfie in which the face is contorted, teeth bared, mouth twisted. The effort is to dispel the "pretty girl" image.  This is fully merited given the media is focused on dictating pose and appearance for any one who's already pretty. According to Nancy Etcoff, a cognitive psychologist quoted in the piece:

"Modern day beauty images have maintained a particularly rigid definition: ladylike, small, modest unthreatening and virtually emotionless."

The piece goes on to reinforce this perception, observing:

"It takes little more than a scan of any red carpet to see that idea in action: a sea of toothless smiles, frozen foreheads and hunched shoulders, the uniform that every young woman has learned to mimic. And while this generation may be more tech savvy than any other, that beauty ideal can still be crippling."

Let's be clear this  "beauty ideal" can also be exclusionary, merciless and rife with bigotry.  Who can forget the stunning outcry last year after Nina Davuruli   was named Miss America?   Her victory was met with outcry from racist troglodytes via social media backlash.  Why the rampant hostility? Because Nina didn't meet the unspoken beauty standard. She wasn't white enough, too "foreign -looking", according to her Twiteratti critics.

This is why any girl who seeks to break out of the hobbling beauty standard deserves to be applauded.  Thus, as one quoted expert put it, "One of the things ugly selfies do for girls is to strip the conventional approaches to prettiness."

But what if a white woman, or girl, finds herself with an appearance at the cusp of the standard cultural beauty idiom?   By this I mean that her appearance emerges as ambiguous and can't be immediately defined as "beautiful", say as it might for a Marilyn Monroe, Kate Upton or Pamela Anderson.  Such appears to be the case for Olympic figure skating star Meryl Davis - whose face has been variously described as "non-human" or resembling  a 'N'avi alien" (from Avatar), a Disney cartoon character, and a "Grey alien".   Some of those comments can be seen here:

http://www.topix.com/forum/olympics/winter/T2LA22HVRIU6JP5FS

Also:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100222064159AA28fT7

Scarcely able to accept this, I played back some of the figure skating scenes on the DVR, and especially the close ups of Meryl afterward.  It immediately became clear that her facial features diverged from those normally deemed "acceptable" according to the beautyist promoters. Her eyes were very wide apart, for one thing, and her face extremely flat. In some ways, but perhaps only because I'd read some of the comments on Topix.com, she did appear to be like a Disney cartoon character come to life.

What was the problem? Not just in my perceptions, but those of others'. It was that our evolutionary formed vision (and brain)  detected divergences from a symmetry typically associated with both normality and "beauty".  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_symmetry  

Excerpt: "Evolutionary theorists in biology and psychology argue that more symmetric faces are preferred because symmetry is a possible honest sign of superior genetic quality and developmental stability"

Was she "ugly" as some of the commenters claimed? No, but she didn't meet the acceptable symmetry standards biological science associates with how most humans perceive beauty either.  Indeed, on examining her images - paused on the DVR- it occurred that making a selfie might not be a good idea, unless sent to personal friends. If done beyond that circle, she would risk creating a "Poe" of a Selfie. In that instant, I appreciated and realized the extent to which I also had become ensnared in the cultural-media  prejudices of what constitutes female beauty. I had also fallen victim to my evolutionary visual prejudices, i.e. in subjectively preferring a more symmetric female face.  I ought to have been able to see Meryl's beauty as singular and unique to her, as opposed to supposing she risked creating a "Poe" of any selfie! 

As we know, the "Poe" emerged from "Poe's law" originally formulated by Nathan Poe in 2005. Poe's take was that in any confrontation with a creationist - or reading his material- one had to be wary because in the absence of a 'smiley' it would be utterly impossible to distinguish a parody of the creationist (or fundie) from the real statement or real person.

Since then, the usage of the term "Poe" has come to be synonymous with almost any parody on the internet. Indeed, it could be extrapolated to include a certain subset of selfies.  This would include selfies of all those females, for example, who are at the cusp of cultural beauty standards, like Meryl Davis. For this subset, then, doing a selfie would risk creating a Selfie Poe.  In line with the definition of Poe, it would be impossible to distinguish a parody of such - say a girl  deliberately creating an "ugly" selfie by artifice, from a girl whose appearance comes over as 'strange', or at least unconventional,  doing one naturally and seeing it confused with the former category. 

This is why one might advise Meryl Davis not to do selfies outside her circle. (Apart from the fact if some of those on Topix.com ever got hold of them, they'd have a field day).

What does it say about our culture that an unconventionally attractive woman like Meryl Davis - at the top of her game in the Sochi Olympics - could be regarded as an "alien" or odd, or even having a deformity ("frontonasal dysplasia" cited at Ask.com)?

It means that our culture has become too superficial, too obsessed with appearance and "good" looks. It means that females especially, have been cajoled to submit to a cruel cycle of self-condemnation and magnifying imperfections. The "ugly selfie" then emerges as a kind of playful slice of authenticity in an age and culture where everyone and everything seems airbrushed to perfection. One psychologist actually said the teen girls were "conducting a visual coup d'état" against the perfectionist standards inherent in beauty imperialism.

Let's hope their coup d'état succeeds!

If not, it means we are a long, long way from being ready to meet and greet actual extraterrestrials. And if there are such, their best strategy remains avoiding planet Earth.