Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls (hollywoodreporter.com) 487
An anonymous reader shares a Hollywood Reporter article: It had taken years -- and the passionate support of Kirk Kerkorian, who financed the film's $100 million budget without expecting to ever make a profit -- for The Promise, a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, to reach the screen. Producers always knew it would be controversial: Descendants of the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire shortly after the onset of World War I have long pressed for the episode to be recognized as a genocide despite the Turkish government's insistence the deaths were not a premeditated extermination. Before the critics in attendance even had the chance to exit Roy Thompson Hall, let alone write their reviews, The Promise's IMDb page was flooded with tens of thousands of one-star ratings. "All I know is that we were in about a 900-seat house with a real ovation at the end, and then you see almost 100,000 people who claim the movie isn't any good," says Medavoy. Panicked calls were placed to IMDb, but there was nothing the site could do. "One thing that they can track is where the votes come from," says Eric Esrailian, who also produced the film, and "the vast majority of people voting were not from Canada. So I know they weren't in Toronto." The online campaign against The Promise appears to have originated on sites like Incisozluk, a Turkish version of 4chan, where there were calls for users to "downvote" the film's ratings on IMDb and YouTube. A rough translation of one post: "Guys, Hollywood is filming a big movie about the so-called Armenian genocide and the trailer has already been watched 700k times. We need to do something urgently." Soon afterward, the user gleefully noted The Promise's average IMDb rating had reached a dismaying 1.8 stars. "They know that the IMDb rating will stay with the film forever," says Esrailian. "It's a kind of censorship, really."
Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternative title: IMDB fails to prevent botting and vote brigading
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much this, right here.
Given the topic of the movie, how frickin' hard would it be for IMDb to dump anything with a Turk/Russian/{CDNs-common-to-VPNs}-IP-originate vote of less than 3 stars?
I'm guessing they'll wait for some SJW-centric production to get vote-bombed, and then decide to do something about it?
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that is really workable, they could use VPNs, proxies or bots. Its hard to see what they can do long term other than hope the bots are a minority.
They should probably restrict reviews for early releases, I think Rotten Tomatoes did something similar in the past few years - at least I feel they used to have an issue with people rating movies before they could have been seen.
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
There's tons of ways to block botting. Easiest is when a vote is entered the IP and userid for that vote goes into a table with a timestamp. When another vote for the same IMDB item is cast the table is referenced and if it's the same IP but a different userid and less than 10 or 15 minutes has elapsed, the vote is rejected and the UI pops a message about the same IP with a captcha to solve. If the captcha is solved then the vote is registered. That way bots are blocked but a family who just watched a movie and for some reason ALL of them wanted to rate it on IMDB within a 15 minute window afterward could still vote.
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Many sites do it, and while it takes some setting up, it;'s fairly straightforward to prevent folks from the same IP or username from voting repeatedly. It's not normally an issue in IMDB because who cares enough about a movie to vote enough times to change the ratings in that way?
Oh wait...
Actually, when I see something with lots of single stars I'm pretty suspicious anyway.
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Wait up, is this fair or is it just selective censorship based upon greed. So you have what is often crap content created by Hollywood vs content collectively created by many more individuals that targets the Hollywood content. Basically content wars, the rich and greedy vs trolls (why trolls, fine, want a another label to distort from what it originally meant fine, trolls originally were individuals whose purpose was to annoy people of forums, not creative content challenging other content and collective '
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Restricting to the locations that the film is available would not make it impossible to game, but then nothing ever will. It will turn the potential millions of downvotes into hundreds or thousands (also you can just block proxies).
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vote of less than 3 stars
Why only negative votes? Wouldn't it make sense to dump everything?
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)
You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.
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Well sure, but obviously that is not how their system has ever been set up.... so... is this another one of those ideals vs. reality debates or what?
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You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.
Wrong. You might think that's a good idea, and I would completely agree, however IMDB does not. If they did, this wouldn't be a problem, because they would have designed their system to account for this.
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Well, if the movie has only been shown once in a certain location by a small number of people, and a far larger number of people from another region suddenly jump in and vote it down, I'd say it's pretty obvious they haven't seen it.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is: if you want your polling/rating system to be any good, you have to put in protections to prevent abuses like this. Since it's really hard to predict these things beforehand, you have to be ready to react after the fact and make changes and
Humorous (Score:4, Insightful)
You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.
Say you sat down every one of them and made them watch the movie. Would that change votes in any way? No.
Online voting will always reflect that hatred is more intense and brings more action than love.
Only Solution: Take online voting results with a boulder of salt. Or do not allow voting at all.
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Have you seen the ratings for Tropes Vs Women? They didn't do anything about that either.
Not everything is an SJW conspiracy
No, and neither can you. Because she hides the ratings and disables comments.
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Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars (Score:2, Redundant)
Looks like the summary's conclusion and the Turkish campaign to baselessly and irreversibly denigrate the movie are overblown.
Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars (Score:5, Insightful)
45.2% 10s, 53.4% 1s! More oddly 55K mens votes average 4.3 while 24K womens votes average 9.6!
Re: Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars (Score:3, Funny)
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It's worth noting that this isn't Best Picture of Best Foreign Film material either, its current 5-star rating is pretty close to what film critics who have seen the movie have put it at. General feeling is that the film is well intentioned and historically accurate but soapy. Think "Pearl Harbor" if it was more faithful to the politics -- there were fun moments in that movie as well, but the majority of its runtime was devoted to a love triangle with three very poorly written characters. The Promise also f
Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading (Score:2)
In other news, people who did bad things in the past continue to deny having done bad things.
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In other news, people who did bad things in the past continue to deny having done bad things.
The Turks don't deny that bad things happened, nor do they deny that they were the ones that did it.
What they do deny is that it amounted to genocide. In 1915 the British Empire landed 250,000 troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the Russians launched a major offensive in the Caucasus [wikipedia.org]. The Turks were fighting for their survival as a nation. The Gallipoli landing failed, mostly due to astoundingly incompetent leadership on the allied side, but also due to the brilliant and decisive leadership of Mustafa
Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading (Score:4, Informative)
"Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people?
I don't think so."
You're wrong. Simply, clearly, and provably wrong. There's a whole wikipedia page full of high-level government witnesses - including Turks/Ottomans - that talk about the intentions, the systemic nature, and the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Basically, the Turks who want to continue to deny the genocide (and you, apparently) are claiming that they didn't _intend_ for 1.5 million to die, it 'just happened' that, after the massacres, everyone who wasn't killed right away somehow died during an organized and planned forced march through the Syrian desert with no food, water, shelter, or rest.
And the justification of some Armenian 'fifth column' is ridiculous. You don't kill all the women, children, and grandparents because a handful of Armenian men are helping the war against you. It was simply an excuse to take action against a hated group people who were already denigrated third-class citizens because they weren't the correct religion.
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to suggest that the alternative title could be "Someone Didn't Get The Memo: IMDb Scores Are Still Useless".
A few years back, I used an extension to display IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores in Netflix's web UI, thinking they'd help me cut through the chaff and find the films I was most interested in. It became apparent almost immediately that while the Rotten Tomatoes scores were good and the Metacritic scores were occasionally decent, the IMDb scores were nothing more than useless noise, given that they were so far out of sync both with what the other sites are reporting, as well as what my own experiences would suggest reasonable scores should be for the films I had seen. And really, none of this should come as a surprise, given that IMDb is a wiki platform with poor policing, meaning that the scores have become a battleground for various forms of e-peen measuring contests.
So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job, particularly with their distinction between critic and audience scores, which makes it much easier to understand what to expect from a movie:
- High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year
- High critic score/low audience score = a thought-provoking film that likely won't entertain
- Low critic score/high audience score = mindless, "junk food" entertainment
- Low critic score/low audience score = a trash film that's only thought-provoking inasmuch as it begs the question: why was this film was made?
In contrast, IMDb scores give me no useful information. They don't tell me what to expect, whether I'll like the film, or even if it's a good film. They're just noise.
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Let me provide a play-by-play reaction to your post...
You obviously don't know what the phrase "begging the question" means
Crap, did I accidentally use it other than how I intended?
*goes back to check*
No, I used it exactly as I intended to. Is it possible I've been misusing it this entire time without knowing any better?
*pulls up a DuckDuckGo search in another window while reading the rest of your comment*
and aren't willing to find out
Well, that's a rude and baseless assertion that isn't supported by any evidence. I certainly wasn't willfully misusing it, and I'm not aware of having received correction f
separate votes by region, demographics? (Score:2)
Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing to do with Hollywood or Trolls. Just people pushing an political idea.
Oh no! (Score:2)
Someone is wrong on the internet! And now all those random anonymous people who post on IMDB mean I'll never watch another movie again!
If IMDB was so important to the success of a movie wouldn't there be evidence of every major hollywood movie being hyped there by millions of paid shills?
This makes sense.... (Score:2)
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As I understand it, a troll is someone who puts up something (a vote, a post, whatever) for the specific purpose of pissing someone else off or harming them somehow, usually reputationally. I believe it was originally related to the fishing term, with the implication that the intent was to generate an angry reaction (see also flamebait). There's probably subtleties to the term that I'm missing, though.
moives don't make a profit (Score:3)
movies don't make a profit. They make it all on the back end where we don't have to pay out any % to actors.
Re:moives don't make a profit (Score:4, Informative)
Peter Jackson had a percentage of the gross for LotR. And guess what? All the gross numbers from abroad were completely phony.
The game was: Peter and I both have a claim on the gross, while the film is owned by a company where I have controlling interest. Then I sell the full foreign rights to a company that I have 100% ownership of for, say, $10 million. Peter gets a piece of the $10 million in gross, I get to keep the $200 million in foreign sales.
This is how most of the Russian oil tycoons made their money, too, by selling low to a shell company that they completely owned. The Russian gov't gets a percentage of the low price sale for the oil lease. The tycoon gets 100% of the profit thereafter.
A solution (partly) (Score:2, Interesting)
The IMDB should make it so the user could sort the rating by geography. In this way one could, for example, filter out all the reviews from Turkey from the ratings results. or see how a film was rated by reviewers from a particular country or region.I mean IMDB is a database right?
Ignore ratings (Score:2)
Why should I depend on some random people to tell what I will like and dislike?
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Yes, but the critical question is--do you get those reviews you base your decisions on from well-known critics, or those aforementioned random people?
Not just hollywood (Score:2)
Recent non-movie events with airlines, the 'leggings' incident and United fiasco.
Yet another reason to hate Turks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, sometimes I think these idiots deserve Sultan Erdogan. What a pathetic display this was. Of course there are plenty of good, decent, progressive Turks out there, and it's very sad that their voices can rarely be heard over these idiot children. Very sad indeed. I can't imagine anyone taking an IMDB rating seriously, but the fact that they are refusing to do anything to combat this is equally disturbing. "Nothing they can do" is total bullshit.
I'm a troll and I'm triggered (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s. Trolling is high art - the modern day equivalent of the court jester - the practice of teaching everyone not to take themselves too seriously.
This crap that is happening now with 4-chan esque social justice warfare against women, minorities, the historical fact of the Armenian genocide is *not* trolling. These people are doing the exact opposite of trolling - they're propping up the global misinformation machine instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more).
STOP calling them trolls. This is not what trolling is!
Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered (Score:5, Funny)
I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s.
I can vouch for this. I remember seeing this guy around regularly since the 90s.
Verified Viewer ratings? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some e-commerce sites have tags on reviews for verified buyers- maybe the movie studios should implement a similar system for movie reviews. Get a code after watching a movie, maybe by dispensing them as viewers leave (not connecting to a specific ticket to avoid privacy concerns) or when you download or buy a DVD. Use the code when reviewing the movie. Allow people to see confirmed viewer and non-confirmed ratings. Of course this could be abused, but seems no worse than the current system and might offer some improvements.
Rick Santorum lost the battle with google bombers (Score:2)
IMDB 'can do nothing': poppycock (Score:3, Insightful)
What utter BS that IMDB cannot control their rating system. They will not maybe. But cannot is a lie. Do they not own their own site?
Just what does a star mean anyway? (Score:2)
It's a completely subjective unit of "goodness" or "I-like-it-ness" whose ratings tend to cluster around 1 or 10 (or 5 on a 5-star scale) making it a very polarizing way of rating things.
But if you asked people to rate each movie relative to another movie, they would have to think a little more and so voting brigades could not simply assign "1 star" or "10 stars" to movies.
Then you could use a Condorcet method or similar to rank all movies in order from least to most liked, and assign each movie an "all mov
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whose ratings tend to cluster around 1 or 10
It's called rater bias and it in itself is an important and useful statistic to have. The bias in the scale makes people say they either like something or they hate something. People who think critically have the option to not chose absolutes. However when you average the results, even when they are skewed to either end they produce a very meaningful answer, a tendency for people to either like or hate something.
In general, don't overthink reviews, and don't live by them. Different movies have different the
Verified watcher? (Score:2)
You can't trust IMDB (Score:2)
So we're back to being unable to trust reviews. Game reviews are bought and have been from the first gaming magazines. Film critics have weird bias that makes it tough for average people to compare their own tastes to the critic's tastes. At least with Siskel and Ebert you had two very different points of view, and I tended to like things that Siskel liked.
In this era of we have setup very democratic systems that allow everytone to contribute. Theoretically we can have access to information of not just the
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Bah, who looks at ratings on IMDb anyway? That always seems to be the site for factual movie content..
_examples_
Usually: Hey, who was that guy in that one movie? Oh, let me check IMDb...
Never: Hey, should I go watch that movie? Let me check IMDb...
You trust IMDB ratings? (Score:2)
RT critics say 38%.
Why would you trust IMDB ratings for any film? Is there anyone here that finds IMDB ratings at all useful? Serious question.
I find RT scores useful for things to avoid because they're trash. And in general a high score (by critics) is a good sign.
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RT critics say 38%.
RT critics are as unreliable as an IMDB review that has been trolled by 4chan before its been released. They often get corrected, they often disagree with user ratings. Frankly RT are a great source for a general idea of how good a film is ... a month after its release.
Maybe the movie isn't very good (Score:2, Insightful)
These folks seem to think their movie deserves a high rating because of the honorable subject matter and courage to tell a little known story. I've seen plenty of films which were lousy no matter what the subject matter was. This might be just a failed attempt.
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I only use IMDB for the user reviews (Score:4, Insightful)
IMDB rating number these days is completely meaningless. Many complete trash films that deserve 2 or 3 stars at most end up with very high ratings because.... Disney owns the film.
Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?
My guess is that it's easier to game the user rating than it is to submit fake reviews, because writing a genuine-looking review is much harder than simply stuffing fake votes with a bot or (in Disney's case) simply paying for a higher number.
Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews (Score:4, Insightful)
Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?
14yo kid: It has laser guns and lightsabers -> high rating
Anal retentive SF-nerd with "Han shot first" issues -> bad review
Seriously, some people take light entertainment waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. Star Wars, obviously. All the superhero movies Marvel makes, they're comic books in movie form. Even LotR had their naysayers because Tom Bombadil was missing and Arwen's love story was a side show from the appendix and... whatever. Consider it a bit like the biggest hits on the music charts, they're not the deepest and most "meaningful" songs. They're what most people want to hear, just like McDonald's isn't going out of business no matter how many food experts shit on them.
Literally Hitler (Score:5, Interesting)
No, this is not against trolls, but something far worse. Erdogan is literally the closest thing in the industrialized world to Hitler we have. Don't believe me?
1. It's looking more and more like he staged a fake coup (remind you of the Reichstag burning?) to preemptively crush dissent.
2. He's adopted a view of immigration and migration that is close to the Nazi policy of lebensraum.
3. He has used a popular referendum to greatly empower himself and gut the authority of competing institutions.
4. He has taken a Turkish equivalent of the Nazi view about fellow Germans living in other countries. His government went nuts when European states clamped down on Turkish political organization in their borders.
5. FFS, he even channels Hitler with the moustache.
Odds are very good that if there is a mass civil war in Europe over race and religion, it will be directly the result of Erdogan's work combined with the idiocy of Merkel and a few others who let him get away with it. Anyone who considered Erdogan, who wants to resurrect Ottoman Turkey, would have wanted to keep those migrants out at bayonet point if necessary.
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He's going to have a real problem on his hands when all the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq is finished with ISIS and has idle time on their hands. Erdogan will stop at nothing to prevent a unified Kurdistan, and it's likely to tear NATO apart.
Weak Response... (Score:3, Insightful)
IMDB can be doing more to fix this issue but since they are taking the easy out here, fighting fire with fire is the only suitable response.
I believe the best response would be for IMDB to limit what users can rate and how early in the release of the movie it can be rated. When someone attempts to put a rating on a movie that hasn't officially been released and their account is new or with very few reviews (which I assume is the case with most of the fake reviews), you hold their reviews back for moderation and flag as internet troll.
Streisand effect, please. (Score:3)
This ought to backfire.
IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings are garbage (Score:2)
Vote breakdown (Score:3)
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Turkey lost any and all of the credibility it had earned over the years when they "elected" Erdogan and his disgusting Muslim buddies to ruin the country.
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Informative)
Erdogan did not run as a dictator. During his initial rise to power he was actually a very moderate politician. He called for EU membership for Turkey, and under his direction the country did enter negotiations with the aim of getting that membership. He pushed major labor reforms too, giving employees substantially greater protections than ever before in the country and introducing non-discrimination law. He changed later on, slowly, over the course of the 2000s at 2010s, depending increasingly upon tighter control of the media and repression of opposition to stay in power and growing steadily more conservative and Islamist in his social policies.
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Informative)
He called for EU membership for Turkey
And he single-handedly took those aspirations behind the shed and shot them in the back of the head.
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Seems like a great strategy for gaining power. Promise liberals feel-good utopia to get their votes and money, and then as the other poster said, "drag them behind the shed and shoot them."
Like did you know Al Gore, Mr. Inconvenient Truth? While I'm NOT debating the validity of global warming, it's pretty alarming that Al Gore just-so-happens to own and run companies that directly benefit from green energy grants, including IIRC, one where polluting companies "buy" pollution credits from his company who get
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Erdogan did not run as a dictator. During his initial rise to power he was actually a very moderate politician. He called for EU membership for Turkey, and under his direction the country did enter negotiations with the aim of getting that membership. He pushed major labor reforms too, giving employees substantially greater protections than ever before in the country and introducing non-discrimination law. He changed later on, slowly, over the course of the 2000s at 2010s, depending increasingly upon tighter control of the media and repression of opposition to stay in power and growing steadily more conservative and Islamist in his social policies.
Culminating in quite possibly orchestrating the coup last year and using that (and the very fortuitous rise of ISIS in Syria) to justify the sweeping grab for power that he just pulled off, effectively guaranteeing he will be in control in Turkey at least through the next decade. He used the coup to purge the military, leaving only loyalists who he can trust not to fulfill the Turkish military's customary role of maintaining secularism in government. You have to give him credit: for a politician he played the long game very well.
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An excellent example of why limited terms are a necessity, even if it means cutting short a good leader's reign.
Re:Fake movie (Score:4, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with them being Muslims, you abject moron. It has everything to do with them being authoritarian dogmatic pseudo-religious autocrats.
If a Christian or Jewish cabal orchestrated a coup, it would have equally nothing to do with those religions either except as their rhetorical umbrella.
Re:Fake movie (Score:4, Interesting)
It has nothing to do with them being Muslims
Are you sure?
In 2011, Erdoan ordered the tearing-down of the Statue of Humanity, a Turkish-Armenian friendship monument in Kars, which was commissioned in 2006 and represented a metaphor of the rapprochement of the two countries after many years of dispute over the events of 1915. Erdoan justified the removal by stating that the monument was offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar,
Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Fake movie (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:100 years ago, who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
What about people who only learn and repeat meaningless cliches?
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And I'm fresh out of mod points. I wouldn't be able to decide between funny and insightful anyway.
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Denying historical atrocities helps no one.
FTFY.
I don't understand why the Turkish government doesn't just admit "yes it happened, yes it was horrible". As you said, it was 100 years ago. Who from that time period is still in the government today? Just because you admit that an atrocity occurred in the past that was perpetrated by the government that you presently lead, does not mean that you are saying that you yourself perpetrated those atrocities.
"I vow to never make the same mistakes as my predecessors" is a much better line than "all of
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Because people spend their days listing off information about every historical event that ever happened to everyone?
Re:100 years ago, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Digging up historical grievances helps no one.
And burying historical grievances only hurts the next group of victims when you can't show that you are on the path to the next atrocity.
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Except it was 100 years ago. The next everything already happened. And the next, and the next, and the next, etc.
What's the specific lesson then? If it's so important that people who weren't alive in WW1 need to be burdened with it, then surely you can tell us.
Re:100 years ago, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:100 years ago, who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Turkey is a bit like North Korea. The dedication to the country is absolute and the country can do no wrong, not in history, not in the future. Turkey wants to be a member of the EU. Yay Turkey. Turkey thinks the EU is an evil institution against everything Turkey stands for. Yay Turkey. Turkey doesn't have a dark and evil past, anyone saying otherwise is just trying to re-write history. Turkey's current supreme leader is nothing like a dictator. Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Fethullah Gulen who had the audacity to try and overthrow the Turkish government by coupe ... while not even in the country.
All over Europe, the only foreign flags I see waved at protests are for Turkey, the greatest country in the world. We don't want to live there, but don't you dare tell us they aren't the greatest. Yay Turkey.
Also genocide didn't happen.
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Except none of the people you are talking about were alive and making decisions during WW1. So they are not guilty of what happened in WW1 and the WW1 Turks are not guilty of these alleged attitudes today. They're 2 entirely seperate groups of people.
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The can't do no wrong mentality is what causes differences in opinion of what went on. Compare it to say Nazi Germany who owned the holocaust to the point that denying it happened is actually a crime.
Not being guilty because it happened in the past and not admitting that something happened are two entirely different things. If they are so detached from their past, why are they so insistent that what happened was a-okay, totally not genocide, no sirree. It's a very different attitude from other governments t
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The difference is Germany lost a war and the victor's version of history was forced down the throats of the next generation. Turkey won its war of inependence and threw the Italian,French and Greek invaders out so Turkey could teach its children its version of history. History is written by the winners. e.g. Churchill starved 14 million Bengalis to death during WW2, Hitler starved 6 million Jews to death. Can you guess who won the war from how much is written about the Holocaust and how much is written abou
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e.g. Churchill starved 14 million Bengalis to death during WW2
No, try 2.1 million. [wikipedia.org] And apparently there's debate about whether it was his fault.
Debate over the specific cause or causes of the Bengali famine hinges on a series of interlinked questions: when the nature and scope of the disaster were recognized, whether enough food was available at the provincial or national level (or via international food aid arranged by Great Britain) to feed the population of Bengal, and whether the failure of the colonial rulers to alleviate the crisis was due to incompetence or insensitivity to Bengal's needs. [...]
The question of when the famine was or should have been recognised is relevant to a discussion of the unreliable crop statistics. The 1942–43 Annual Report of the Indian Statistical Institute (1945, p. 107) asserts that the lack of reliable crop output statistics left the government effectively uninformed about the state of agricultural output, precluding any timely response. Others, however, have expressed doubts that the government was naive or "caught napping" when it rejected those statistics out of hand.[354]
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If someone wrote something like this about the Jewish deaths people would be on their head like a ton of bricks shouting "Holocaust Denier" I accuse you of being a "Famine Denier"
Because both are well documented, and we know mostly what went on in both events. If someone came in here saying 20 million Jews died in the German Holocaust and I responded that historians generally think that around 6 million Jews died in that time, that wouldn't make me a "Holocaust denier."
Historians also agree that the Nazi regime was pretty much the sole cause of the Holocaust, while saying Churchill or the British being the sole cause of the Bengal famine would be absolute nonsense. They're guilty, a
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This wasn't even the first famine. The British caused repeated famines through food confiscation in the 300 years of rule in bengal. The British Parliament even discussed that a famine was good as it helped to control the "population problem". Hitler did not invent the term "Final Solution" or "concentration camps". Both were British inventions - one used in India and one in South Africa against the Boers.
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So where is the big deal in saying...
Where's the big deal in not bothering to say it?
Leg me tell you what the big deal is by "not bothering to say". In the very best case, it will be a passive aggressive [wikipedia.org] way of denying that it happened. Denying what happened is being dishonest. A man or a country that never admits mistakes is a dishonest man or country. Why do you not care about honesty?
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That was a complete non-answer not even remotely related to what I asked for. Will you in 2047 start classifying the Nazi killing of jews during WW2 as "non-relevant information" because the condition "100 years passed" is true?
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This is the first I'd heard of this movie. But , from TFS it's:
a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide
In my book, setting a movie against a historical backdrop doesn't constitute "digging up historical grievances", it's been a common part of movie making for a long time.
That said, Turkey is generally hyper sensitive to this. As far as I'm aware though, the facts are against them.
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The point isn't "don't make a movie". The point is: who cares? People should stop trying to start/continue fights about ancient history.
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Digging up historical grievances helps no one.
Ahem.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
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There's that cliche again. What's the specific lesson that's so important here? Please inform us exactly what lesson we are supposed to learn from these specific events. And explain the relevance to today and tomorrow.
It's important, right? Please explain then.
Re:Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad mov (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly don't know much about Turkey, but as for the Germans: They've owned up to what happened and they've passed laws to make the truth easier to get at. They've searched the world over to locate war criminals from that time and ensure they are prosecuted. They've repatriated stolen art, personal belongings, and family fortunes to those it was stolen from. In short, a generation of Germans who weren't even alive when this atrocity happened, have stepped up to make amends and heal the world. So even if Turkey was innocent of the accusations, they would be no better than the Germans. And by the way, Hollywood has flogged Germany over and over again for what happened... so in all respects you are mistaken.
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Pointing to other's wrongdoings does not justify one's own.
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People with legitimate grievances aren't "trolls", just people you disagree with.
Disagreeing with a movie portraying the killing of over 1 million Armenians by the Turks during WWI is a legitimate grievance?