Latest Sony Hack is Some Serious Shit

When an entertainment company as large as Sony is targeted almost out of the blue by a brutal totalitarian nation-state with nuclear ambitions and a boatload of crazy, I don't think network security is going to amount to much. There are rumors that part of the job was done from the inside, perhaps by some North Korean agents or perhaps by compromising some of Sony's IT people, or getting physical access to their computers at home.

Given that Kim Jung Un had his ex-girlfriend executed, along with a bunch of her fellow orchestra members, and that he had his own uncle fed to starving dogs along with a large number of top-level military officers, that he puts tens of thousands of people into death camps, and that he took the Sony movie as a number-one personal insult that must be avenged at any cost, there is really no way a company can be expected to be playing on his level, nor would we want them to. Who would want to go to work for a company that had flamethrowers and mini-guns in the lobby ready to kill anyone who didn't get through the retinal scanners?

And with so much more ease. Imagine what would happen if a terrorist armed with a pellet gun started deflating people's pool toys!

But seriously, waiting till everyone is inside, then chaining or blocking the exits and setting the building on fire would produce a mass casualty event.

I'm starting to think if Barack Obama had signed the PATRIOT ACT, it would be just hunky dory.

The interview Sony Picture's CEO did on NPR was pure fluff. Claiming they weren't craven cowards, claiming any company wouldn't have responded or noticed as 100 TB worth of data was transfered, that they were totally on the ball and he couldn't have done anything better. This is a first order fuck up and he needs to be sacked.

I also think Terry Gross gave him nothing but softball questions, no doubt the CEO made that a requirement for the interview, because when the guy said he wanted to release the film but there is just no way to do it... Bullshit. George R. R. MartI'm said he'd show it at the independent theater he owns plus there are around 30,000 other independent theaters many of which would show it or Son could just make the movie free on XBOX live.

He is not only incompetitent and asleep at the wheel but he also is just lying about it now.

Then you are an ignorant man. The left has been the primary ones opposing it from the get go and the left were the ones who started dumping on Obama for being such a weak moderate on everything. It is nice a few libertarians finally jumped on the band wagon, better 13 years late then never, but all of them pretty much voted to extend it so it was just a talking point. They don't plan to take any action.

Clackamas Town Center would like a word.

For this scale, no. But a few of South Park's episodes have gotten chopped up and edited by their network because of depiction of Muhammed and making jokes at Islam's expense after the bruhaha over the Dutch drawing of him with a bomb attached to his head.

And I think Dicky and everyone disgareeing with him are kinda talking past each other. We can nitpick what it's called--censorship, self-centorship, whatever--but I think this is an extension of the "run in fear" culture we've become. When Britain got attacked on 7/7, VW ran this ad about a month or two later. Their Islamic community is proportionately larger than America's and probably has more loons with Britain's blind eye towards the practice of Shriah (sic) law.

There is one thing I've barely seen mentioned that is such a HUGE part of this.

In spite of all the talk of "terrorism" and censorship, this event really shows one thing about American society.

How lawyers have done so much damage to it.

Does anyone not know the one and only reason that Sony (and Paramount and the theater chains) are pulling these movies is legal liability? The lawyers who really run the company have told them how badly they would be sued if they puffed out their chests and showed the movie anyway and then by some strange chance there is an attack resulting in deaths or injuries. Lawsuits that would likely be won, no matter how stupid.

The saddest part of all...

We know the lawyers aren't wrong.

It amazes me in general how many people (not specifically here) are attacking Sony for being "cowards", while at the same time defending anything any other company does so long as it is technically legal no matter how morally reprehensible.

Sony is doing what they think puts their company at the least financial risk, isn't that what corporations are supposed to do?

That thought should have led you naturally to the thought that maybe you should revise your preconceptions.

It almost certainly didn't, of course, but it should have.

And that makes them not spineless cowards how?

Hollywood pushes boundaries. Its audience (the West) follows decades later, kicking and screaming. Community organizers push boundaries. Liberals wait until an idea gains critical mass and is fashionable before they rally behind it. (And then conservatives follow Liberals 30 years after.) It's a nuanced game of follow the leader, not an organic human evolution.

Bernays was absolutely right: the opinions of the mass will be influenced by invisible men.

The opinions we hold aren't ours. We take them from news, movies, TV, internet, etc. This is just a new form of monarchy in which the mass believes that since we get to choose which side of the argument with which we identify most, that somehow this means we're achieving social progress.

We only have the freedom to complain about this side or that side. Red or blue, republican or democrat, Coke or Pepsi.

The people who create the dialectics are the money-interests.

Meanwhile the atmosphere is destroyed, the land is raped, the food is poisoned, the animals tortured, and our connection to nature is severed.

Social progress? Beauty of the West?

Because that suggests business is meant to have principles beyond "make as much money for shareholders as possible".

I'm all in favor of that, if we are going to extend it to all businesses.

Nope. Censorship.

That the external force threatening repercussions happened to be a hacking group, rather than a direct governmental body, in no way stops it being actual censorship.

Worse, there was precisely zero evidence they could follow up on the threat. If there was a credible threat, they'd have been right to cancel the screenings, but there wasn't.

And before the media we took them from other sources.

We're a species good at being influenced. You just noticed? Haven't all the various horrors of war over the millennia clued you in on this? Grab a history book, and go look at the horrors people have committed in the name of a "greater good" they've been ensnared in, or how shit scared the Christians got when the Moors dared teach people to read or the Bible getting translated into native languages thus taking the power of interpretation from the clergy.

It's wired into us because one of our ancestors got to survive better when it saw a bunch of other primates run up the trees and played follower, meanwhile the less influenced ended up as lunch.

And yes, governments and advertising agencies take advantage of it.

Or independent. The mainland UK has gone from a 3-party system to a 6-party one in under a decade, I'm sure if the land of the free gets its finger out of its arse long enough it could have a crack at that too.

Uh, no. They're just one.

Did you send this from Arrakis? Because Earth certainly has areas that could be applied too, and we do have global climate change, but I live in a modern Western democracy that's about 80% undeveloped, and have visited plenty of barely-disturbed places, so maybe you need to put down the Morrissey collection, and get out instead of playing the internet Emo?

Yes, no progress here. Women tied to the sink, unable to vote, gays hiding, unable to publically show affection or marry. Oh noes. It's like Saudi fucking Arabia.

Oh wait, no, you're just being morose.

I'm really trying to understand here.

Could you give an example of a film before "The Interview", that didn't self-censor, but should have?

How about pretty much every film Madonna ever made?

Oh, excuse me for being somewhere else on a Friday night and at 3:00 on a Saturday morning.

Yes, by "self-censorship" I did mean "discretion," though the latter's somewhat fuzzier and can mean other things. However, if the latter makes you feel less threatened, you may use that.

I didn't realize you were smuggling your work out of the gulag on cigarette paper, Aleksandr, though it would explain your chronic paranoia. In my country, the only "authority" I answer to is the terms of my contract. When I rewrite - and I rewrite frequently - it's to meet my own standards, not some Scary Teacher standing over me with a ruler.

When it comes to movie production, I think it runs deeper than that. There's a peculiar subcategory of Internet Warriors with an insatiable need for media product even as they vocally and repeatedly despise its producers.

They require a different standard from a movie studio than they would, say, from a mortgage bundler.

*Shrugs off the contempt*

But what movie should have self-censored itself?

Any movie that can think and act on its own behalf independent of any human agency.

All right, what movie should have been self-censored by its director/producers?

None springs to mind. I'm usually more concerned with sloppy editing, as in "Jeez, this might have been an interesting scene if it had been 10 minutes shorter!"

This is not to say that any of us not directly involved have any clue how many rewrites a film script undergoes or why.

If you're looking for McCarthyism here, you won't find it.

And that's the problem. The current administration and Congress is doing nothing to stop communist infiltration, intimidation, and control of the US entertainment industry.

Back in the McCarthy era they were actively rooting out North Korean agents and sympathizers who wanted to censor the movie studios to not allow anything critical of communist regimes, and indeed to promote the glorious triumphs of rulers like Kim Jung Un sitting on his sun throne. Left unchecked, we'd now be watching movies that are worse than any happy-worker productions coming out of North Korea.

What was the result of the McCarthy era? Movies got fucking wild and entertaining, that's what, because in America we are free to pursue the bottom line and flip the bird at our would-be progressive masters.

^He can't help it. It's the Ebola.

Well, for one thing, McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with Hollywood. For another thing, yes, the communists were trying to infiltrate and strong arm the studios, since Marxists, Fascists, and Nazis all believed that control of the media was crucial to getting the masses to rise up. We stopped Nazi attempts to infiltrate Hollywood, and then asked why the Stalinists should be treated any differently.

If the North Koreans had gained a lot of influence in Hollywood, the Sony hack wouldn't have been necessary because no such film would have ever been made.

Give Federal Farmer a chance. He still has time!