Starship Polaris said:
Samuel T. Cogley said:
I would just like to add that I have no idea who the fuck James Cawley is and I don't really care what he thinks about anything. So there.
Carry on.
You know,
Sam, what's remarkable is that no one "cares what Cawley thinks" but a number of them (not you) profess to have real strong opinions about his character and reliability on the basis of it.
Look folks, we've got two dumb things going on in these topics.
The first is that a lot of us forget how transparent the Internet is and how rapidly rumors spread through it.
James didn't make some big grandstanding public statement about Abrams movie in order to get attention and then refuse to give details.
James made a remark to a limited number of people he more or less assumed he knew on a BBS devoted to his fan film project
which requires registration in order to read. His mistake was forgetting or not realizing that there's no real privacy attached to that kind of thing. What then happened was that someone paraphrased his post here (exaggerating and embellishing the details, please note; there are still people seething about the "wings" that he never mentioned) and the story started spreading from board to board.
The damned story is a headline on three or four Trek news sites. Cawley didn't issue a "press release" or contact
anyone and ask them to promulgate or promote his opinion. Trekkies did that all by their little old own selves, all the while declaiming that He Don't Know Nothing And They Don't Care What He Don't Know.
Hey, traffic equals advertising revenue. The best thing in the world that could happen to Trek webmasters would be for the rumor to go around that Britney Spears has tattooed the new design of the Enterprise on her coochie and that they'll shortly have spy photos to prove it.
Nonsense like this happens all the time. Last week I posted a silly and clearly unserious story about Shatner's supposed role in the upcoming movie here in this forum. It was nothing but a joke. Within a couple of hours I was being sent links to topics at places like
www.startrek.com's forums in which I was being called "a reliable movie insider" and the story was being discussed as if it were real.
There are a lot of explanations for this - my favorite is that the Internet and fandom is carrying a lethal load of idiots. You may prefer another.
The second mistake, or wrongheaded attitude, at work here is Killing The Messenger. People didn't like what Cawley said. To many people this is grounds for ridicule and character assassination.
"This _____ just wanted attention - now that he's got it, he won't tell us all the details we want to know. Of course, he doesn't really know any details. He's just making it up unless he can prove it ("pleaseohplease you big liar tell us all the stuff we're sure you don't know"). The big attention whore must be dicking with us. Oh yeah, he's a poophead, too."
In fact, the webmaster of one popular news site actually got in touch with James and asked him if he wanted a chance to clarify or correct the things that people claimed he was saying (mind you, no one knows who he is or gives a damn about what he says - they just repeat it all over cyberspace, exaggerate it, then call for his head).
IOW, someone tried to find out the facts, and Cawley cooperated. Probably a bad idea where online fandom is concerned - Is Big Crime To Make Anything Perfect On Bizarro World, after all.
He said he wasn't comfortable divulging details - reasonably enough; if he had been he'd probably have volunteered them to his friends in the casual back-and-forth they were having on his (Registration Required To Read) forum.
Terrible idea - declining to talk about something that one's never
offered to divulge to every stranger on the Web is so obviously an ego-driven bid for attention. After all, there's no way that specific information might accidentally cause trouble for the person or persons who may - hypothetically - have shared the designs with Cawley, right?
It's not like what had transpired rapidly in a few hours ought to have given James any pause whatsoever about possible unintended consequences of speaking casually on the Internet.
Result: more villification of Cawley. IMAO he'd unknowingly crossed the bright red line by offending the Trekkie Sense of Entitlement that's so nauseatingly evident in so much of what's posted about the new movie (and everything else regarding the Franchise). That's close to being a capital offense.
Now, if I were to remark - hypothetically - that what James
has said about the designs for the film are completely in line with things I've reliably heard elsewhere and have declined to remark upon because I couldn't see it accomplishing anything other than causing trouble; if I were to suggest that James is not the only person outside of the production to have gotten a look at some of this material, and that none of what he's said was news to me...well, the folks who've been jerks about this would be welcome to call me whatever they like and accuse me of whatever they want.
Because unlike James Cawley, I wouldn't be at all surprised or flustered by any of it. And because somewhat like
Samuel T. Cogley I don't give a fuck what strangers think.
