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Tag: machines
'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Desperate Culture Warriors Try To Seize 'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Right-wing culture warriors are constantly finding new things to get mad about, turn into content, and, if possible, monetize — from the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss to the purported wokeness of Mr. Potato Head. But that machine doesn’t only concoct culture war defeats to rail against — its cogs also need to identify successes.

Enter Top Gun: Maverick, which broke Memorial Day box office records with a $156 million gross over the four-day weekend. A simple but logical explanation for this large audience would be that it is a well-made, critically acclaimed sequel to a beloved property that stars a major movie star flying fighter jets and opened on a holiday weekend opposite no competition. But right-wing culture warriors saw the Tom Cruise vehicle as a nail, whipped out their hammer, and declared that its success is due to its supposedly “anti-woke,” “pro-America” politics. Their implicit argument is that films that don’t share their political views shouldn’t be made in the first place.

The right-wing content mills have all tossed out versions of the same point. Breitbart’s headline was “Masculine, pro-American ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ blasts to $146M opening, towers over woke flops.” Outkick.com went with “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ soars on pro-America, woke-free message.” At the Daily Caller, it was “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ crushes the box office as Americans crave non-woke content.”

By Monday, these arguments had moved from the right-wing digital space to Fox News. On Fox & Friends, guest co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the film’s success is because “they didn’t wokeify it. It’s unabashedly patriotic.” Outnumbered co-host Tomi Lahren responded to a quote from the Breitbart piece with “Amen,” adding, “Can we please bring back good movies like this, because the movies that we have had the last couple of years have not been great; they’ve been woke. They’re all about an empty virtue signal for those that make them.”

The right seems to think “wokeness” matters for audiences whenever it is useful for their argument. Breitbart’s John Nolte compared Top Gun: Maverick favorably to the Star Wars sequels, writing that the film “didn’t do what Star Wars did and pervert a romantic-adventure series into a shrill Womyn’s Studies lecture.”

But Top Gun: Maverick is likely to finish with a much smaller audience than those films: The Force Awakens currently holds the all-time domestic box office record, the other two films in the sequel trilogy come in at No. 10 and No. 15, and all three had bigger opening weekends, according to Box Office Mojo. By Nolte’s logic, Americans love “shrill Womyn’s Studies lectures,” though I think it’s more likely that they just love Star Wars films. (I did not personally enjoy any of those films for reasons unrelated to whatever Nolte is talking about.)

I was one of the millions of Americans who saw and enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick over the weekend. If you like well-executed films, fast planes doing cool things, dad vibes, and the theatrical experience, I’d recommend seeing it on the biggest screen possible.

Is the film “anti-woke”? The cast is significantly more diverse than in the original film, with a female naval aviator effectively serving as the next-generation Tom Cruise character. But this isn’t really interrogated — it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. If the film’s box office take had entered the danger zone, it’s easy to imagine the same culture warriors pointing to that diversity as the reason.

Is it “pro-America”? The heroes are U.S. naval aviators, and it’s assumed that their mission is a just one. But there’s no real discussion of America or why America is good – it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s certainly no less patriotic than First Man, the 2018 moon landing film that right-wing culture warriors attacked on specious grounds.

I found Top Gun: Maverick to be an enjoyable movie. But while it’s certainly possible to read hidden depths into its script, it is fairly clear that any such depths are unintentional. As director Joseph Kosinski explained in an interview with Esquire, he saw the film as a character study meant to entertain broad audiences:

The first movie, is a boy becoming a man and I think this story is a man becoming a father. And that's what a Top Gun movie is. It's a rite of passage story that's character-driven but wrapped in this big action movie exterior.

Hopefully that entertains everybody. Regardless of whether or not you're into planes.

In fact, that does entertain everybody — or at least, enough people to break the Memorial Day box office record. The right seems driven to shoehorn its weird political concerns into the film, but the film’s success doesn’t require more complications than that.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Voting Machine Study Finds Problems, But Not Ones Easily Fixed

Voting Machine Study Finds Problems, But Not Ones Easily Fixed

By Chris Adams, McClatchy Washington Bureau, (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Finding that many of the nation’s voting machines are “perilously close” to the end of their useful life, a study of voting systems in all 50 states recommended a series of steps that could be undertaken before voters cast their ballots in coming years.

Estimating it as a $1 billion problem, the experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law said it likely was too late to replace equipment in most places before the 2016 election — although local officials should be preparing emergency paper ballots and taking other steps to minimize problems caused by failing machines.

Officials should already be looking ahead to 2020.

“One of the things that was really shocking to me is how far reaching it has become, and how few places have taken steps to replace their equipment,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

The center is a nonpartisan law and policy think tank and advocacy organization that “seeks to improve our systems of democracy and justice.”

The report — “America’s Voting Machines at Risk” — was based on a wide-ranging review of the nation’s election systems. It included interviews with more than 30 state and 80 local election officials across the country.

While some voting-machine problems have been written about locally, others had not, reflecting the reality that even national elections are handled on the local level.

In fact, broad problems in voting systems can go unnoticed for years — until there is a tight election.

Consider Florida and the presidential election of 2000, where the state’s hanging chads, high voter error rates and lost votes became central to the outcome and recounts that gripped the nation and put George W. Bush in the White House.

“Everything is at the local level,” Norden said. “So unless you have a Florida 2000 situation, you’re not getting national coverage of these individual problems, even if they’re becoming fairly common.

“In some ways, that’s the lesson of 2000,” he added. “There were plenty of warnings about punch-card machines before 2000, but they were reported locally. There were warnings from experts, but nobody was listening.”

As it stands, several battleground states have aging equipment.

According to Norden, 90 percent of counties in Ohio are using machines that will be at least 10 years old in November 2016. In Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, about half or more of counties have machines that will be 10 or more years old by November 2016.

The Brennan Center’s state numbers assume that equipment currently in use will not be replaced by 2016, although a very small number of counties or local jurisdictions could upgrade between the time they were surveyed and the elections.

One example of the kind of problem cited in the study: Until an upgrade last year, the voting system in Leon County, Fla., was more than 20 years old and still needed to use an old-fashioned — and slow — analog modem to transmit information. When he needed to replace those modems, voting systems manager Mark Earley turned to eBay.

“They were even hard to find on eBay,” Earley said in an interview with McClatchy. “The system was a great system, for as long as it lasted. But as that modem issued showed, it was nearing the end of its life.”

Although Leon County, which includes the state capital of Tallahassee, upgraded in time for the 2014 election, several other counties in the state are still on the same system Leon County previously used, Earley said.

The central problem is that unlike voting machines of previous eras, systems in place today were not designed to last for decades.

“No one expects a laptop to last for 10 years,” the report noted. And yet many of the voting machines today that are entering their teen years have not been properly maintained — perhaps being stored in moist conditions — or rely on outdated software.

According to the center, experts agree that the expected lifespan for core components of most voting machines purchased since 2000 is between 10 and 15 years.

In all, 43 states are using some machines that will be at least 10 years old in 2016. In 14 states, machines will be 15 or more years old.

And while officials in 31 states said they wanted to purchase new voting machines in the next five years, officials from 22 of those states said they did not know where they would get money to do so, the report said.

That said, systemic problems and aging machines don’t necessarily make for an immediate calamity.

“No one we talked to predicted there will be a vast meltdown of all, or even most, of the nation’s voting equipment in 2016,” it concluded. “Aging machines do not all fail at once on a single day.”

Photo: A study of voting systems in all 50 states recommended a series of steps that could be undertaken before voters cast their ballots in coming years. Rich Pix/Flickr