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How U.S. Audiences Feel About Gen AI in Entertainment Content "The starkest divides appear among young people. Positive views within the 13-17 cohort are especially striking given how severely the 18-24 cohort diverges, with 58-point gaps for AI-scripted movies and TV and https://t.co/SRq9a3pWm7 #GenAI #Entertainment #AudienceInsights #US

However you feel about him, Ricky Gervais is one of the most prominent animal rights advocates in the entertainment industry. He donates profits from his stand-up comedy tours to fund animal welfare groups: nearly £2.5 million from his last "Mortality" tour. Good man. #RickyGervais #AnimalRights #ComedyForACause #GB

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The Tolerance That Censors Institutions preach tolerance, yet disagreement is increasingly punished. As protected classes expand, demands for compliance, surveillance, and reporting grow. A tolerance-saturated society becomes hostile to dissent. Many call it hypocrisy, but the contradiction may be strategy. In 1965, Herbert Marcuse’s *Repressive Tolerance* argued that liberal “equal hearing” can perpetuate oppression. “Liberating tolerance,” he claimed, must discriminate: intolerance toward the Right, tolerance toward the Left. Why? Classical Marxism expected industrial workers to revolt from misery. Instead, comfort increased and revolution stalled. The Frankfurt School offered a remedy: capitalism colonized consciousness, creating “false consciousness.” If factory revolt won’t start, revolution must begin in the formation of minds—culture, education, psychology, entertainment. If so, neutrality becomes the enemy. Free debate spreads the system’s ideas. Elections let prisoners choose their preferred warden. Liberal freedoms act as “steam valves,” releasing pressure to prevent revolt. Tolerance becomes directional: oppressive ideas are suppressed; liberating ideas are amplified. Censorship and punishment are reframed as freedom’s highest expression. Marcuse also recognized liberal resistance to censorship and proposed “emergency” suspensions when oppression is deemed urgent—a logic echoed when speech is treated as harm and coercion as protection. The unsettling possibility is that nothing is malfunctioning: tolerance may function as a weapon. The final stage requires no visible censor—the individual internalizes it, policing their own thoughts.

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Why Good Times Make Weak People The pinnacle of tyranny is a society in which people are controlled without force because they love their servitude. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explored this idea. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, its citizens are controlled not through terror but pleasure. Soma provides instant relief from discomfort—a “holiday from the facts.” Huxley’s people are not prisoners but satisfied customers: the State produces children, promiscuity is normalized, and entertainment fills every empty moment. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell feared that truth would be hidden from us, while Huxley feared that we would become so distracted that we would no longer care about it. The Softening of Man Good times can make bad times possible. When safety and luxury become normal, people can lose sight of the struggles that created them. Andrew Lobaczewski argued that prosperity can weaken profound reflection. Pleasure becomes dominant, while uncomfortable truths are dismissed because thinking about them requires effort. Those who think critically may even be ridiculed. This creates a dangerous cycle: societies lose the capacity for psychological reasoning and moral criticism, allowing catastrophe to develop unnoticed. Sterilizing Genius Nietzsche understood that comfort, elevated above all else, can destroy the qualities that made civilization possible. Struggle, ambition, discipline, passion, and courage helped create prosperity—but prosperity can weaken the virtues that produced it. The Odyssey illustrates this. The Lotus-Eaters simply lose the desire to return home. Odysseus must drag his men back while they weep to remain. He rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality and endless comfort, choosing the difficult path home. We admire that choice because comfort without purpose is not a life worth admiring. Nietzsche imagined the endpoint in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a society where safety and sameness become the highest ideals, producing “no shepherd, and one herd.” Anyone who seeks greatness becomes an aberration.

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Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

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The Pinnacle of Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would allow politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion—because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley’s *Brave New World* explores this idea through an eerily relatable dystopian society. Unlike Orwell’s *1984*, Huxley’s world contains no obvious oppression. The state does not need to “stamp on a human face—forever.” Instead, citizens willingly chain themselves to pleasure and distraction. Authorities do not rule through terror, but by giving people everything they think they want. Soma, a government-approved drug, becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustafa Mond, the World Controller, compares it to Christianity without the suffering. By swallowing a few tablets, citizens can escape reality—a temporary holiday from the facts. Lenina cannot understand why Bernard refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard says, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina views his desire for authenticity as a kind of illness. Bernard wants to experience passion and recognizes that life involves more than contentment. He craves genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than emotional regulation by the World State. Lenina’s confusion results from her conditioning, which teaches her to view unhappiness as a technical problem. This belief is captured by the saying, “A gram is better than a dam.” The citizens of *Brave New World* are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the state, relieving people of the responsibilities of parenthood. Their free time is filled with promiscuity, cheap entertainment, and endless sporting events—what might be called “slop” today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through fear, while Huxley imagined a society where oppression would be unnecessary because people would willingly surrender themselves to pleasure. There would be no need to ban books, because no one would want to read them. An abundance of low-quality information would make censorship unnecessary; the truth would be drowned out by noise. Huxley warned that people’s “almost infinite appetite for distractions” could make tyranny not only possible, but welcome.

¡PÓSTER DEDICADO A LOS FANS! 👏 Por su estreno en cines el día de hoy, COYOTE VS ACME comparte este nuevo póster con el mensaje dedicado a los fans que hicieron posible que la película viera la luz. Hace más de un año, se comunicó que el proyecto iba a ser archivado de por vida por WB para deducirlo como pérdida fiscal. Los fans no permitieron que eso sucediera y realizaron una gran campaña en redes sociales y de forma presencial, que logró que Ketchup Entertainment consiguiera sus derechos de distribución. #CoyoteVsAcme #Cine #Fans

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Tonight, Netflix reveals the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6, a game that according to reporter Sebastiaan Quekel will become the biggest entertainment release of all time, featuring a detailed game world, innovative gameplay, and unique storylines, including the first female protagonist. (translated)

Netflix ontploft vanavond, alle ogen gericht op megashow GTA 6: ‘De Nachtwacht van onze tijd’

Primeiras imagens de “Jogos Vorazes: Amanhecer na Colheita” divulgadas pela Entertainment Weekly. https://t.co/S1t9kP1bLg #JogosVorazes #AmanhecerNaColheita #Cinema

O elenco de ‘Jogos Vorazes: Amanhecer na Colheita’ para a Entertainment Weekly. Estreia em 19 de novembro nos cinemas. https://t.co/N81Mj35Z7n #JogosVorazes #Cinema #Entretenimento

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In the podcast De Dag, it is discussed how a hacker named Cyberleek is leaking gameplay footage of the yet-to-be-released GTA 6 and what the impact of this is on gamers and developer Rockstar, with the remark that the release of the game will be an unprecedented event in the entertainment industry. (translated)

Podcast De Dag: gamers in de ban van GTA 6 én een lekkende prei

„Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Jason Arday was treated as a symbol, not a man
www.nrc.nl

DEDICADA A LOS FANS QUE LA HICIERON POSIBLE 🫶 COYOTE VS ACME incluye un mensaje de agradecimiento a los fans que hicieron posible el estreno de la película en cines. “Dedicado a todos los que publicaron, compartieron, sostuvieron carteles y alzaron la voz cuando más importaba. Esta película llegó a la gran pantalla gracias a ustedes.” Recordemos que la película originalmente había sido archivada por Warner para nunca ver la luz, esto como una estrategia fiscal para deducirla como pérdida. Los fans no estuvieron de acuerdo con esta decisión e hicieron una gran campaña en redes sociales y protestas en las oficinas centrales de WB. La película terminó siendo salvada gracias a Ketchup Entertainment, que adquirió sus derechos de distribución para lanzarla oficialmente en todo el mundo. La película llegará a cines a partir de este jueves 🎬 #CoyoteVsAcme #GraciasFans #Cine

Harry and Meghan's departure from their retreat in America and their return to England would be driven more by economic reasons, related to an offer for a new project for Meghan, than by concerns regarding Charles's health, as the couple seeks to capitalize on their image and adjust to life in the UK to ensure their children receive an English education. (translated)

“Altro che la malattia di Carlo, la vera ragione che ha spinto Harry e Meghan a tornare a Londra sono i soldi, ecco cosa gli hanno offerto”: il retroscena
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Lesley Vogel, the mother of the deceased actress Hayden Panettiere, has spoken out about her daughter's unexpected death, stating that Hayden was lost and that her ex-partner, Brian Hickerson, had a negative influence on her life, as he was with her at the time of her death. (translated)

Moeder van Hayden Panettiere over ex: 'Deze persoon, van wie we al een tijdje af wilden, was bij haar toen ze stierf'
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Lesley Vogel, the mother of the late Hayden Panettiere, has revealed in a statement that her daughter was 'lost' and that she was concerned about the influence of Brian Hickerson in her life, while she thought Panettiere has finally found peace after her tragic death at the age of 36. (translated)

Moeder van overleden Hayden Panettiere: ‘Ze was de weg kwijt’

Alguns dos textos exibidos nos caminhões de protesto em frente à OA Entertainment são: — "A Jennie é de classe mundial, mas a equipe ainda é amadora? Monte uma equipe profissional de verdade!" — "Vão apenas dizer que vão processar? Publiquem comunicados regulares sobre os processos e divulguem o andamento de cada um." — "Para onde foram os conteúdos? Retomem imediatamente os bastidores de viagens, treinos, gravações e os Vlogs." — "Ela sofre com deepfakes de IA, e os funcionários ficam só olhando? Montem uma equipe dedicada ao monitoramento imediatamente!" — "Não negligenciem a opinião pública nas plataformas chinesas (Xiaohongshu e Weibo); monitorem e respondam ativamente." #Protesto #Transparência #MídiaSocial

Com a circulação de material deep fake e conteúdo de ódio contra Jennie do BLACKPINK, a OA Entertainment anunciou que tomará medidas legais contra os responsáveis por disseminar essas postagens. https://t.co/olOJfD2eDZ #DeepFake #BLACKPINK #Justiça