Shanzai FAIL

WSJ:

In a development that could further inflame Hollywood’s frustrations with unauthorized reproduction of its intellectual property in China, Chinese netizens are accusing CCTV of repurposing footage from the movie “Top Gun” for use in a news story about an air force training exercise.

Wall Street Journal again reveals its startling inability to grasp the point when it says the incident may "further inflame Hollywood's frustrations with unauthorized reproduction of its intellectual property" (though I'm holding out hope that the writer was being very cheeky there). Here's a bit of advice, WSJ: you can see more of the world if you hold the mirror away from your rectum. Because I'm pretty sure if anything, Hollywood's laughing its ass off because THE GOVERNMENT OF A SUPERPOWER JUST BORROWED A CLIP FROM ONE OF ITS MOVIES AND TRIED TO PASS IT OFF AS ORIGINAL FOOTAGE.

Footage, mind you, ostensibly aimed at showing China's power in the form of military might.

This after high-level denunciations of fake news, by the way.

This, with the eyes of the world's media still on China because of President Hu's trip (google "Top Gun China" and see how many media outlets from near and far have picked up this story).

I am stunned and happy and so, so entertained.

There is something sublimely funny and revelatory about this incident. We all know or strongly suspect that there are scores of people within the Chinese government who are holdovers from a vastly different era, an upside-down world of anti-rightist campaigns in which ineptitude was rewarded and common sense massacred. But to see these nitwits smoke themselves out, inadvertently, using the tools of our digital age, well, it's almost enough to make me weep out of some strange mixture of joy and relief, as if: Okay, so naivete can survive, like a cockroach in nuclear winter, in the highest organs of statecraft. Somehow I see this as a validation of the human spirit, those pulpy and sentimental parts of us that are fallible and wistful and capable of expressing our love for a 1980s Hollywood blockbuster in truly the most spectacular and ingenious of fashions. May you never change, CCP. God bless you.