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  1. You must read the article before you can comment on it.
    • bill
      Top reader of all time
      2 years ago

      A silly piece of fluff. This whole article is about protecting a minority, which makes it very hard to criticize. But, against my better judgment, I’ll still try.

      Of course we should treat scarred and disfigured people with dignity, respect and kindness. And of course we should use art, including film, to expand our consciousness.

      But Hollywood doesn’t produce art. It produces commercial entertainment. And there’s a reason that none of us have heard of Happy Face or Dirty God. We want entertainment more than we want enrichment.

      Sociologist Fiona Whittington-Walsh needs to dig deeper. The “political and societal criminalization of so-called ugliness” goes way deeper than the advent of the camera. In The Odyssey, super-hunk (and bonafide sexpot) Odysseus slays one ugly after another. Cyclops is the most memorable one for me.

      The main argument of this article is juvenile, but the author does dance around some concepts that are actually super interesting. Humans are not wrong to prize beauty. This is deep, innate & real. But humans are also missing out when they fear and reject ugliness. That was the moral behind the original legend of Beauty and the Beast. In short: lonely/cold girl finally finds super-hot chemistry when she allows herself to get turned on by the beast. Good shit, sister! Get your freak on!

      I have plans to see the new Bond film and I sure as hell better see a lot of Daddy Craig without a shirt on. That’s literally what I’m paying for. But when the movie ends, I’ll return to a reality that’s even deeper and better, a reality where the things that make us different have the potential to make us sexier, scarier, more powerful, and more interesting.

      The craziest part of this article, to me, is that the author seems completely blind to the fact that some of us might actually believe that Safin, with that epic texture of facial scars, is even hotter than the scarless, smooth actor who plays him. That’s the kind of narrow-mindedness that’s really holding us back.

      1. Update (10/23/2021):

        I rated this article “10” (which moved it from #26 to #9) because I want more people to see my comment. Article ratings have some issues that need addressing. Maybe we should just scrap.

      • DellwoodBarker2 years ago

        Are you saying scrap the article ratings? I vote “NO” on this as it is what makes RU so Unique and Fun and Interactive. Unless there is some inherent system flaw or bug that u are responding to that is surfacing to be made aware of to fix; then that is understandable.

        I Dream of a Song Oriented Voting App like RU so that listeners can hear new songs from new artists or undiscovered artists and rank them in the way this app does.

        1. Update (10/23/2021):

          Correction: Upvote; instead of rank. Poor word choice here.

        • KapteinB
          Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
          2 years ago

          I Dream of a Song Oriented Voting App like RU so that listeners can hear new songs from new artists or undiscovered artists and rank them in the way this app does.

          Hey that's not a bad idea!

      • KapteinB
        Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
        2 years ago

        I rated this article “10” (which moved it from #26 to #9) because I want more people to see my comment. Article ratings have some issues that need addressing. Maybe we should just scrap.

        Do you have statistics of how often the different ratings are used? I think my most used rating is "8", and it's very rare I rate something lower than 6. (The way I'm interpreting the ratings, below 6 would mean I didn't really find it worth sharing at all.)

        I remember back in the day, YouTube videos had a 5-star rating system, but at some point they changed it to today's thumbs up/down system. My guess is the vast majority only every used 1 and 5 star ratings, so it was effectively the same. Netflix did the same some years later, replacing their 5-star ratings with a thumbs up/down system. (I kinda miss the old system on Netflix. Instead of showing a percentage match like they do today, they would have a star rating for every show and film you hadn't seen yet, estimating how many stars you would like it. It was pretty neat.)

        But both YouTube and Netflix use their ratings to feed their recommendation algorithm, something Readup doesn't really have. Here the rating is just the average rating for how much those who finished the article liked it (used for scoring the article compared to other AOTD contenders), but only the ones who 1) finished reading it and 2) bothered rating it, so not an entirely representative portion of readers.

        I think I lean towards scrapping the article ratings altogether, for simplicity. They add complexity (one additional step before I can post an article), without adding a whole lot to the experience (in my opinion at least). Scrap the ratings, and you can even consider adding automatic posting any time we finish reading an article, streamlining the process even more.

    • DellwoodBarker2 years ago

      As I read this I couldn’t help but think of the actor and character in Scarlett Johansson’s Under The Skin; the victim she releases.

      Incorporating that actor in a future Bond film to correct the issue here would Be Ideal.