My coworker was telling me how well Jerry Maguire stands up today and I forced myself to remember the major beats of that piece of shit:

  1. Big company bad and evil; small start up good and pure.

  2. Being principled always pays off in the end.

  3. Everyone can make it if they try hard, believe in themselves, and believe in each other.

  4. We can have perfect interpersonal relations if we just learn to balance work and life appropriately, and it's up to us to accept that challenge.

Fuck this movie. More importantly fuck people who like this movie. Jerry would have turned out just like his old firm buddies (even if the major plot points largely stay the same). Everyone in this movie is actively trying to exploit each other in the beginning. And even though it's totally inconsequential to how bad these people are in their shitty lives, if you ask me the most unbelievable part is when Jerry and Bridget Jones get back together at the end.

Not buying it.

Tell me about the shitty liberal movies that are renting space in your head.

  • Shoegazer [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Office Space

    stealing is bad even if it’s fractions of a penny from a corporation!

    But then the plot twist is that

    stealing is actually good if you can get away with it

    • HornyOnMain
      ·
      2 years ago

      stealing is actually good if you can get away with it

      unironically true

      • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        if it doesn't harm anyone and nobody even notices it happening, how can it be wrong?

        oh wait that applies to creepshots under some circumstances... maybe we need to be deontologists after all

        • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I think you could make the argument that it is wrong to do something if there is both

          1. A chance that someone finds out what you've done

          2. Harm done to that person if they do find out

          The psychological harm done by an invasion of privacy is enough to consider it wrong even if that psychological harm isn't guaranteed. imo anyway

          • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            yeah recklessly risking harm to someone is bad, that's a good angle. Still leaves some shithead who is certain they can get away with it but they probably aren't justified in that certainty unless it's an independant tech cloning hard drives while they have custody of my computer.

            that one is theft of intellectual property which i'm not sure is a real thing but it'll do for now and i'm not trying to be a libertarian debate bro here.

          • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            that's not what i meant, jackass. i meant you could spy on somebody in an undetectable way and that finding where that's harmful to the victim (or "victim", i guess) is a lot harder than with noticed surveillance.

            i think it's wrong and it's definitely against the norms of any society i'd want to live in but I struggle to articulate why from first principles.

              • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                The problem with your whole thing is comparing a sex crime to a minor theft from a corporation.

                no, the comparison is between the logic. not the crimes. it doesn't need to be creepshots it could be a non-sexual spying.

                my bodily autonomy has nothing to do with somebody in the high-rise six blocks away having a telescope that could see into my window or a government satellite seeing into an open-top beach shower.

                undetectable crimes need a different explanation for how they cause harm

                  • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    the deontology part was a joke and i'm shocked anyone took it seriously

                    You’re conflating “harm” with “morally incorrect.” Insulting someone may not harm someone but it still isn’t the morally correct thing to do.

                    no, insulting someone is harmful in the general case and the specific case where they shrug it off or friendship contexts where it's understood to be a joke doesn't change how we should consider insults broadly as a class. the undetectable equivalent would be insulting someone privately and in a manner where they couldn't find out about it (e.g. star trek "fans" saying shit about wil wheaton online in public means he could reasonably find out about it compared to some jackass only saying the same thing to his roommate about wheaton's child acting means it's vanishingly unlikely that would ever contribute to the abuse.)

                    if something other than harm makes things bad I don't really know what that is or how you have a coherent framework around it.

                    have a reasonable expectation of privacy be considered part of bodily autonomy. Or just have it be considered important but separate.

                    yeah the point is we expect that privacy in our homes and beach showers but that privacy can be undetectably violated and I have a really hard time figuring out how I'm harmed by somebody seeing me cleaning my butthole if I don't know it happened and they never contact me or post the photos online etc.

                      • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
                        ·
                        2 years ago

                        is that you seem to understand how violating privacy is bad but you can’t say that because you don’t have a moral framework to dub it so. I’d say you have it backwards. Moral frameworks do not impose morality but rather attempt to explain it.

                        yeah asshole i'm trying to figure out the basis that we intuit it to be wrong. 99.9999% of the things we talk about being bad are bad because they do harm. ethical veganism is based on harm. queer rights are defended because our existence doesn't harm. and so on.

                          • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
                            ·
                            2 years ago

                            How about the idea that harm isn’t a requirement for an action to be considered bad?

                            for the fourth time, what fucking basis then?

                              • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
                                ·
                                2 years ago

                                despite mentioning Deontology which does just that.

                                except deontology is obvious bullshit, like I said, that was a joke.

                                You could also say that only actions and not their consequences are the basis of morality.

                                that sounds like deontology, you just need the "rules"

                                You also have the golden rule, which supposes that a morally permissible action is one in which the other person would be reasonably okay with.

                                "treat others how you wish to be treated" is not the same as "treat others how you figure they'd like to be treated". masochists following the former is an obvious flaw.

                                How about a universal system of morality is impossible and thus your question is at fault?

                                we have implicit moral frameworks because we can make moral judgements about novel scenarios so it should be possible to work out an explicit one that maps to our intuition.

                                That’s not how the burden of proof works. I don’t need to have a positive assertion to prove that yours is incorrect.

                                if you're going to say mine is wrong that means you're using a different one and you should be able to describe it.

    • DickFuckarelli [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah. I hate the "but your stealing" part from Rachel. This movie is perfection in aesthetic (it hit so close to home with its office satire I shivered the first time I saw it) and the comedy is pretty great. Turns out the message is just kind of sort of total bullshit.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        that argument was so unpersuasive that it basically just washed over me. They literally couldn't even show any reason for why it was wrong for example anyone being hurt or even inconvenienced.

        My brother in christ it's your story you control the narrative why are you just stating your point with no narrative support.

        that said the moral of office space is that you should burn down the office if your boss moves your desk so you can't see the squirrels

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The office space guy was way happier as a labourer even though he has to endure a lot of the same petty bullshit and jokes that pissed him off before, they don't really dwell on that cause it's just a quick throw away gag. He probably also took a massive pay cut, they never really got into that.