Communist Muppets

[Todeswind]

It ain't easy being green, but according to Fox Business, Kermit the Frog and his Muppet friends are reds.

Last week, on the network's "Follow the Money" program, host Eric Bolling went McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, "The Muppets," insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood's so-called liberal agenda.

Bolling, who took issue with the baron's name, Tex Richman, was joined by Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center, who was uninhibited with his criticism.

"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message," he said.

"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry," Gainor continued. "They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

Indeed, there was no mention of the benefits of oil drilling in the Muppets, but there was also no discussion of any other aspect of the industry. Richman, played by Chris Cooper, was out to destroy the Muppets theater. Kermit and his friends, then, were not committed environmentalists (though one must imagine the frog is concerned with his swampy homeland) but simply puppets looking to save a place they once loved.

Still, Gainor blamed the film, and its predecessors, for Occupy Wall Street and the environmental movement.

"This is what they're teaching our kids. You wonder why we've got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people walking around all around the country, they've been indoctrinated, literally, for years by this kind of stuff," Gainor said. "Whether it was 'Captain Planet' or Nickelodeon's 'Big Green Help,' or 'The Day After Tomorrow,' the Al Gore-influenced movie, all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations is bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie 'The Matrix': that mankind is a virus on poor old mother Earth."

The Teletubbies were unavailable for comment. Mahna-Mahna.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/0 ... _ref=false

There is a clip at the bottom of the linked page.

I would post this without comment but honestly I'm too annoyed. Of course they're "commies", they're from a kids program. Kids programs are ALL communist because the values you are trying to teach children are things like "sharing with others" and "helping others" which are not inherently capitalist values. Children's programs exist in a wonderful utopia in which the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and everybody goes home happy... well everyone except the bad guy because he's a dick.

I would be goddamn terrified to see a children's program that was wholly capitalist. The Ayn Rand puppet hour sounds like a fucking TERRIBLE idea.

I'm getting really sick of Fox reporting non-news like it was a major social issue and raising a stink over things that make no god damn sense.

[Zinegata]

Uh, they're not really saying that children's shows should stop promoting good values like sharing or helping others.

The article seems to be much more about the (general) complaint that a lot of movies and TV shows nowadays rams an environmentalist message down the audience's throat. Which does happen and can get kinda grating at times - that's how you get some audiences to cheer for the humans in Avatar.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, because it's so annoying when you're an oil CEO and you can't make the rest of the world stop talking about that pesky global warming and those irrelevant little spills.

I don't think the "environmentalist message" in popular media is at all out of line. I think it's a necessary counterweight to the fact that in our daily lives we routinely totally ignore environmental concerns out of expedience.

[Zinegata]

Yeah, because it's so annoying when you're an oil CEO and you can't make the rest of the world stop talking about that pesky global warming and those irrelevant little spills.

I don't think the "environmentalist message" in popular media is at all out of line. I think it's a necessary counterweight to the fact that in our daily lives we routinely totally ignore environmental concerns out of expedience.

It depends really. Wall-E was a wonderful way of promoting a pro-environmentalist message without having to depict humans as a bunch of inherently evil bastards. Many others simply fall into the trap of depicting technology as inherently evil and that we must revert to a more "natural" way of life - to the point of nature-worship.

Besides which, my main point is that the article seems to be talking about the environmentalist message in a lot of media and not about kid's shows promoting good values like sharing and being good to one another. The main example may be the Muppets, but when you've also got stuff like There Will Be Blood it's pretty clear they aren't talking about kid's shows being commie.

[Spoonist]

But the eviro angle is completely missing in the muppets so its a red herring used to start exactly the kind of discussion you have above.
Instead he wants to tear down THEIR theatre to drill, giving a completly understanable opposition.

[Simon_Jester]

It depends really. Wall-E was a wonderful way of promoting a pro-environmentalist message without having to depict humans as a bunch of inherently evil bastards. Many others simply fall into the trap of depicting technology as inherently evil and that we must revert to a more "natural" way of life - to the point of nature-worship.

Again, I think that in this day and age, if nature worship isn't mentioned respectfully now and again, the entire idea that there's anything worth keeping about nature is likely to die out on its own.

Which would be a damned shame- to create by our own hands a terrible and sterile way to live, because it didn't occur to us that we were losing anything that would be hard to replace.

Besides which, my main point is that the article seems to be talking about the environmentalist message in a lot of media and not about kid's shows promoting good values like sharing and being good to one another. The main example may be the Muppets, but when you've also got stuff like There Will Be Blood it's pretty clear they aren't talking about kid's shows being commie.

If the Muppets is a terrible example of this, it's a terrible example. Picking it out just illustrates that what we're seeing here is a vague complaint that can be tacked onto any piece of popular entertainment: it doesn't matter exactly which works are promoting this nature-worshiping stupidevilcrazy environmentalist wackiness, because surely SOME of them are...

There Will Be Blood might be a better example, a vicious sketch of the character of an early 20th-century oil baron... but stories about men going mad with power and wealth and turning into monsters are older than the oil industry, probably older than Rome. Oil is just the means to the end there, and if the industry can't handle the implication that some of its CEOs are bastards, they ought to have chipped in a few billion more for cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. Getting beatified to the point where people won't even dare to think of you as potentially less than perfect takes a lot more work than the average CEO is willing to put in, especially when it's cheaper to hire PR flacks to complain.

[Alyrium Denryle]

It is worth mentioning of course that given the fact that most of Kermit's relatives will go extinct either directly or indirectly as a result of climate change, even if there WAS a rampant environmentalist message, it would be entirely appropriate.

[Shroom Man 777]

Modern society has thrived on the destitution of the environment and the displacement of old "nature-loving" or at least "nature-respecting/non-disrespecting" ways in place of rampant consumerism and materialism and all the horrible things these entail in the things societies are willing to do to gain more resources and also the effects these have on the peoples affected on all sides (both those growing fat from this rampant greed and those being raped by this self-perpetuating system of excess), and this is continuing with no apparent sign of slowing down.

Boo-fucking-hoo if some cartoons or animus or limp-dicked arts major Hollywood films poo-poo on them. Their oil tankers should grow some thicker skin, so not only will these oil tankers be able to handle criticism better without going all weepy or bitchy, but their thicker skins might also help them resist damage whenever some Filipino skipper runs them aground off the shores of New Zealand or some kind of shit.

DRAINAGE! DRAINAGE, ELI, YOU BOY!

[PeZook]

Yeah...

"Perhaps Tex Richman has enough money, and should not destroy a theatre in pursuit of more?"

is some sort of an anti-corporatist message, as opposed to an anti-asshole message?

God, the wealthy corporate fucks need some thicker skin. This is nothing that a trip to the Bahamas on a private jet full of whores won't heal...

[Shroom Man 777]

They are afraid that Kermit will shoot a nine foot-long arrows through the clear glass canopy of their Learjet. Foolish human shits, they should've ridden on a MiG-21 instead.

What a bunch of pussies.

[aieeegrunt]

It's time to put on makeup
It's time to light the lights
It's time for PEOPLE'S JUSTICE
On the Muppet Show tonight!

I swear somebody at the Onion is rerouting traffic or something, surely Fox News can't be serious?

[VarrusTheEthical]

This is the same Fox News that attacked Sesame Street for having a "Liberal Bias". So yes, they are being serious. At least a serious as Fox ever is.

[Akhlut]

It depends really. Wall-E was a wonderful way of promoting a pro-environmentalist message without having to depict humans as a bunch of inherently evil bastards. Many others simply fall into the trap of depicting technology as inherently evil and that we must revert to a more "natural" way of life - to the point of nature-worship.

Again, I think that in this day and age, if nature worship isn't mentioned respectfully now and again, the entire idea that there's anything worth keeping about nature is likely to die out on its own.

Which would be a damned shame- to create by our own hands a terrible and sterile way to live, because it didn't occur to us that we were losing anything that would be hard to replace.

Assuming it doesn't kill us in the process. If we screw up the oceans too much, we lose a lot of phytoplankton. Which produces a full half of the oxygen we breathe. A lot of people think natural environments are wholly optional and that industry should be favored over nature when the two are at odds with each other. That sort of thinking will kill us if we don't start thinking critically.

[Zinegata]

Again, I think that in this day and age, if nature worship isn't mentioned respectfully now and again, the entire idea that there's anything worth keeping about nature is likely to die out on its own.

Which would be a damned shame- to create by our own hands a terrible and sterile way to live, because it didn't occur to us that we were losing anything that would be hard to replace.

Sorry, but I find nature worship to be pretty darn silly. You can respect nature without needing to turn it into Jesus. Steve Irwin certainly made is cute and entertaining without making us go into nature-worship.

If the Muppets is a terrible example of this, it's a terrible example. Picking it out just illustrates that what we're seeing here is a vague complaint that can be tacked onto any piece of popular entertainment: it doesn't matter exactly which works are promoting this nature-worshiping stupidevilcrazy environmentalist wackiness, because surely SOME of them are...

There Will Be Blood might be a better example, a vicious sketch of the character of an early 20th-century oil baron... but stories about men going mad with power and wealth and turning into monsters are older than the oil industry, probably older than Rome. Oil is just the means to the end there, and if the industry can't handle the implication that some of its CEOs are bastards, they ought to have chipped in a few billion more for cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. Getting beatified to the point where people won't even dare to think of you as potentially less than perfect takes a lot more work than the average CEO is willing to put in, especially when it's cheaper to hire PR flacks to complain.

I'm pointing more at Avatar than at any of the other examples, as it has a pretty bad anti-technology bent. By comparison, Wall E depicts a world wherein humans help restore the balance with the help of technology - as opposed to technology just wrecking everything and that people have to start praying to plantlife so they'll start swatting down VTOLs to even the odds.

I actually liked There Will Be Blood - as you said it's a story about men going mad with power and greed. But oil is getting a pretty tired trope, especially when it becomes the entire focus of the movie like The Green Zone or Syriana. Oil in There Will Be Blood is almost incidental. They could have been insurance company frauds and the movie would still work.

Yes, the oil companies are evil. So are the tobacco companies. So are those that use cheap labor that's almost akin to slavery. But using "oil is evil!" as a crutch to make up for poor storytelling simply gets tiring. I actually love movies that tell other stories that need telling - like Lord of War which is a very good movie against the gun trade, or Blood Diamond which tells us of the shitload of problems in Africa. I'd love to see "Too Big to Fail" too.

(Also, in case it's not obvious, I am not really talking about the article anymore, as really, what's new?)

[Zinegata]

It depends really. Wall-E was a wonderful way of promoting a pro-environmentalist message without having to depict humans as a bunch of inherently evil bastards. Many others simply fall into the trap of depicting technology as inherently evil and that we must revert to a more "natural" way of life - to the point of nature-worship.

Again, I think that in this day and age, if nature worship isn't mentioned respectfully now and again, the entire idea that there's anything worth keeping about nature is likely to die out on its own.

Which would be a damned shame- to create by our own hands a terrible and sterile way to live, because it didn't occur to us that we were losing anything that would be hard to replace.

Assuming it doesn't kill us in the process. If we screw up the oceans too much, we lose a lot of phytoplankton. Which produces a full half of the oxygen we breathe. A lot of people think natural environments are wholly optional and that industry should be favored over nature when the two are at odds with each other. That sort of thinking will kill us if we don't start thinking critically.

Uh, no.

Yes, if you destroy vital parts of the planet's ecosystem we'd be in very serious trouble. However, treating nature and industry as being on opposite sides of the pole with no room for compromise is very much why environmentalism is getting pushed to the fringes. There have been very many successful ventures that mix conservation and industry - especially in areas such as logging and farming. Moreover, some very high technology solutions - such as nuclear power - have very little carbon footprint.

Industry and nature can co-exist, but there will have to be adjustments on both. You can't have factories that belch pollutants at an insane rate, but neither can huge tracts of potentially arable land be kept fallow simply to let "nature run its course".

[someone_else]

They must have seen the latest PETA stunt (that super-mario game with furs or something) and decided to outdo them with something even dumber.

all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations is bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie 'The Matrix': that mankind is a virus on poor old mother Earth

First point: check, the entire point of corporations is making more profit. How can that be good?
Second point: check, oil industry is indeed bad, but only because its goals are (only) maximizing profit, not because oil is the jizz of Satan or somesuch.
Third point: WTF? did this idiot see The Matrix at all? When did The Matrix feature environmentalist stuff? Was focused on man VS machine semi-philosophycal issues and using heavy amounts of bullshit on both sides to hide the fact that outright burning the food the machines were feeding to the humans in the pods would have been more energy-efficient than harvesting the power from brain activity like they were doing.

Again, I think that in this day and age, if nature worship isn't mentioned respectfully now and again, the entire idea that there's anything worth keeping about nature is likely to die out on its own.

I really think that there are better reasons to keep there nature that anyone can grasp, and that trying to educate people into knowing them would be time much better spent than time used to replay the same old boring story of the Good Savage and the friendly Mother Nature (just look at any US-made movie with native americans, even if painted blue, for a quick example).

The issue is that to a stupid strategy you also add that movie producers just drop some simplistic copy-pasted lines about the above in their scripts.
This means most people link "preserving nature" with sentimentalist bullcrap or pot/LSD-using hippies or something horribly retarded like anything I've seen in movies.

And this gets the opposite effect on people. Or for the least desensitizes them on the issue. More or less what happens with PETA and real animalist movements (i.e. people begin to think that all animal activists are crazy assholes like PETA).

So yes, fuck environmentalist messages in commercial movies. They do more harm than good unless the person running the place knows what he is doing. And in most cases they just put it there so they can say they did, not to actually have an effect on the pubblic.

[Zinegata]

The issue is that to a stupid strategy you also add that movie producers just drop some simplistic copy-pasted lines about the above in their scripts.
This means most people link "preserving nature" with sentimentalist bullcrap or pot/LSD-using hippies or something horribly retarded like anything I've seen in movies.

And this gets the opposite effect on people. Or for the least desensitizes them on the issue. More or less what happens with PETA and real animalist movements (i.e. people begin to think that all animal activists are crazy assholes like PETA).

Oh yes, this is definitely part of what I'm talking about when I find some of this nature-worship stuff in movies/shows grating.

[Ryan Thunder]

Agent Smith made some comment about humanity being like a virus in the first movie. That's obviously not the point of the movie but it must be where he picked it up from.

[Civil War Man]

Agent Smith made some comment about humanity being like a virus in the first movie. That's obviously not the point of the movie but it must be where he picked it up from.

What makes it funny is that not only is "humanity is a disease" not the point of the movie, it's the worldview of the psychopathic AI main villain. The humans obviously don't think that, and even the other Agents don't necessarily believe that.

It's like saying the message of Star Wars is "fear will keep the local systems in line."

[Akhlut]

Agent Smith made some comment about humanity being like a virus in the first movie. That's obviously not the point of the movie but it must be where he picked it up from.

What makes it funny is that not only is "humanity is a disease" not the point of the movie, it's the worldview of the psychopathic AI main villain. The humans obviously don't think that, and even the other Agents don't necessarily believe that.

It's like saying the message of Star Wars is "fear will keep the local systems in line."

Considering neocon foreign policy decisions...

[Akhlut]

Uh, no.

Yes, if you destroy vital parts of the planet's ecosystem we'd be in very serious trouble. However, treating nature and industry as being on opposite sides of the pole with no room for compromise is very much why environmentalism is getting pushed to the fringes. There have been very many successful ventures that mix conservation and industry - especially in areas such as logging and farming. Moreover, some very high technology solutions - such as nuclear power - have very little carbon footprint.

Agriculture is still one of the biggest dangers to the natural environment (the Gulf of Mexico's enormous deadzone is entirely traceable to US farming practices in the Mississippi River drainage), while most nuclear power is a pariah industry. Petroleum is still king of energy, with all the attendant problems, while in the US and China, coal mines are abundant and cause enormous problems and the coal industry fights tooth and nail against environmental regulation (as does nearly every industry, as it turns out, because environmental regulations hurt the bottom line).

Industry and nature can co-exist, but there will have to be adjustments on both. You can't have factories that belch pollutants at an insane rate, but neither can huge tracts of potentially arable land be kept fallow simply to let "nature run its course".

You realize that vast majority of arable land has already been converted into farmland, right? The reason the Amazon rainforest is being deforested is because Brazil has run out of arable farmland and is going into marginal land that is only good for a few seasons of planting before turning into unusable land. There's a reason the Aral Sea has been reduced to three salty lakes unfit for anything to live in (hint, it's because quasi-arable land was converted into "more arable" land via increased irrigation, which prevented enough water from reaching the Aral Sea). Turns out we're exhausting a great deal of nature as it stands from our insatiable agricultural appetite, and that hunger is only growing without many areas left to turn into farms. And this is to say nothing that every time you fragment habitat, you're wrecking biodiversity due to the elimination of migration corridors, increased areas for invasive species to cause massive die-offs (such as the near total loss of American chestnuts; the problems wrecked by Asian carp in the Mississippi River drainage; zebra mussels in the great lakes, and so on), and otherwise cause massive disruptions that we likely won't know the results of until it is way too late.

So, why shouldn't we be stringent against industry? I'm all for giving various benefits to those that try to absolutely minimize the environmental footprints, but there needs to be a stick as well as a carrot.

[Simon_Jester]

Assuming it doesn't kill us in the process. If we screw up the oceans too much, we lose a lot of phytoplankton. Which produces a full half of the oxygen we breathe. A lot of people think natural environments are wholly optional and that industry should be favored over nature when the two are at odds with each other. That sort of thinking will kill us if we don't start thinking critically.

The notion was popular in the 19th and early 20th century; while there's a good deal that can be disliked in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, he did have a point about the way 'modernist' attitudes were leading to a perverse policy of preferentially destroying nature.

That only started to change after the rise of the environmentalist movement.

Sorry, but I find nature worship to be pretty darn silly. You can respect nature without needing to turn it into Jesus. Steve Irwin certainly made is cute and entertaining without making us go into nature-worship.

u]No one[/u] seriously tries to turn nature into Jesus, except when telling bizarre fictional stories or while being an utter flake. If you're so thin-skinned that you find it somehow toxic if someone writes a movie or makes a computer game where the planetary ecosystem has a neural network and wrecking the network is portrayed as a hostile and potentially cruel action... then that reflects very strange attitudes about fiction.

I'm pointing more at Avatar than at any of the other examples, as it has a pretty bad anti-technology bent. By comparison, Wall E depicts a world wherein humans help restore the balance with the help of technology - as opposed to technology just wrecking everything and that people have to start praying to plantlife so they'll start swatting down VTOLs to even the odds.

I actually liked There Will Be Blood - as you said it's a story about men going mad with power and greed. But oil is getting a pretty tired trope, especially when it becomes the entire focus of the movie like The Green Zone or Syriana. Oil in There Will Be Blood is almost incidental. They could have been insurance company frauds and the movie would still work.

Yes, the oil companies are evil. So are the tobacco companies. So are those that use cheap labor that's almost akin to slavery. But using "oil is evil!" as a crutch to make up for poor storytelling simply gets tiring. I actually love movies that tell other stories that need telling - like Lord of War which is a very good movie against the gun trade, or Blood Diamond which tells us of the shitload of problems in Africa. I'd love to see "Too Big to Fail" too.

(Also, in case it's not obvious, I am not really talking about the article anymore, as really, what's new?)

Because oil is the linchpin of our civilization, it really should attract a lot of attention. Since we rely so heavily on it, we should be aware of what its extraction costs, how greatly the volumes of money oil revenues create can distort economies and lives, and of what will happen if it runs out.

The average citizen in the developed world can forget these things; I think there's a role for art that seeks to remind people of it.

The issue is that to a stupid strategy you also add that movie producers just drop some simplistic copy-pasted lines about the above in their scripts.
This means most people link "preserving nature" with sentimentalist bullcrap or pot/LSD-using hippies or something horribly retarded like anything I've seen in movies.

And this gets the opposite effect on people. Or for the least desensitizes them on the issue. More or less what happens with PETA and real animalist movements (i.e. people begin to think that all animal activists are crazy assholes like PETA).

So yes, fuck environmentalist messages in commercial movies. They do more harm than good unless the person running the place knows what he is doing. And in most cases they just put it there so they can say they did, not to actually have an effect on the pubblic.

I'm having some trouble parsing some of what you wrote, but I think I understand... and yes, you make a strong point.

[Zinegata]

Agriculture is still one of the biggest dangers to the natural environment (the Gulf of Mexico's enormous deadzone is entirely traceable to US farming practices in the Mississippi River drainage), while most nuclear power is a pariah industry. Petroleum is still king of energy, with all the attendant problems, while in the US and China, coal mines are abundant and cause enormous problems and the coal industry fights tooth and nail against environmental regulation (as does nearly every industry, as it turns out, because environmental regulations hurt the bottom line).

So we should let a couple of billion people starve to death because mechanized farming is the only way to feed everyone?

Or should we instead look for more sustainable farming solutions that also delve into stuff like genetically modified foods to increase crop yields?

Again - much like the nuclear power issue - the green movement needs to make some allowances too. Otherwise people will drill for coal, which I agree ain't a great option.

You realize that vast majority of arable land has already been converted into farmland, right? The reason the Amazon rainforest is being deforested is because Brazil has run out of arable farmland and is going into marginal land that is only good for a few seasons of planting before turning into unusable land. There's a reason the Aral Sea has been reduced to three salty lakes unfit for anything to live in (hint, it's because quasi-arable land was converted into "more arable" land via increased irrigation, which prevented enough water from reaching the Aral Sea). Turns out we're exhausting a great deal of nature as it stands from our insatiable agricultural appetite, and that hunger is only growing without many areas left to turn into farms. And this is to say nothing that every time you fragment habitat, you're wrecking biodiversity due to the elimination of migration corridors, increased areas for invasive species to cause massive die-offs (such as the near total loss of American chestnuts; the problems wrecked by Asian carp in the Mississippi River drainage; zebra mussels in the great lakes, and so on), and otherwise cause massive disruptions that we likely won't know the results of until it is way too late.

You realize that has nothing to do with what I actually said yes? You're just brining out examples of the worst excesses of industry and pretend that no middle ground exists.

So, why shouldn't we be stringent against industry? I'm all for giving various benefits to those that try to absolutely minimize the environmental footprints, but there needs to be a stick as well as a carrot.

Because if you are too stringent, people will starve, have no housing, and have heating or lighting. You cannot simply wield a stick and demand to "absolutely" minimize pollution without realizing what it entails. Cut into corporate profits sure, but make sure you're not ending up starving people - and DO let techs be used that could help solve these problems and not give in to wacky fears of nuclear contamination or unnatural GM foods.