The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. 'This is all going to end in a giant class-action lawsuit.'
I have been running the Oscar website AwardsDaily.com since 1999. I was one of the leaders pushing for inclusion and diversity starting back in 2001 when Halle Berry became the first black actress (and since, only black actress) to win in the category. It is hard to overstate just how hard it it was for actors, writers and directors to penetrate the white wall. I felt it was my moral duty to change that. But then Trump was elected. Then the community and the left became locked in a kind of mass hysteria. For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed. To them, it had to be about race because everything on the left was about race. We watched the witch hunts start on Twitter, then go after people who had done things, then go after people who had said things, then go after people who thought things. Now we are - in total collapse. I have shifted my own coverage (inspired by Bari Weiss) to push back, to speak out, to teach others not to be afraid of the mob and to encourage Hollywood to do the same. This industry cannot survive this moment. Art cannot survive outrage culture. It is killing everything all in the name of social justice. The Golden Globes being canceled was one of the most chilling things I have ever lived through. None of my colleagues would even acknowledge the winners, which trickled out on social media without an audience, without a show.
I myself have been chased around Twitter, called a White Supremacist and had my business threatened. I have a little Netflix show right now that people have tried to get me fired from - all because I speak my mind. It is like the Red Scare which morphed into the Black List which morphed into the McCarthy trials. Eventually it took Eisenhower to stop the madness.
The fear is palpable everywhere you look, and visible in every single one of their films because the ones that push back on that fear don't even their foot in the door.
Those who control the Democratic Party have the same problem as Hollywood right now. They don't realize that they have become an insulated, isolated aristocracy that uses race and social justice as a way to absolve themselves of the crime of success and privilege (like the Catholics before the Reformation). And in so doing is forced to label more than half the country that doesn't support them, racists.
I keep telling people that this, like all episodes of mass hysteria will end. Make sure when that happens that you were on the right side when the worst of it came down. History will not be kind.
The saddest thing for me was the ‘cancelling’ of comedy. When Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock announced they would not be doing college campuses anymore- that was shocking. And sad.
Wokesters are convinced of their moral superiority when in fact - as Andrew Sullivan says in his substack article “Why woke is winning” - wokeness is tribal affiliation with all the self satisfaction that entails: it is cheap simple intolerant intoxicating and as tribalism it is old as the hills.
WOKE will not win in the end; it is bereft of fundamental morality. We just have to wait until it exhausts itself hopefully before it exhausts us all. Kind of like being a parent to a teenager.
Wokeness has been described as a memetic virus, that infects every institution it can coverting them into a wokeness factory and perverting or abandoning there origional purpose. That is how Marxism worked and you can see the scar it left on human civilization from orbit.
And yet somehow have been put in charge of the entertainment industry. Hard to entertain when you're convinced everything is awful and you hate everyone and yourself. Somehow comedians manage to be self-loathing lunatics AND also very funny, but not so in TV and film.
Close, but not quite. What we define as 'woke' or 'political correctness' (it's older brother) or 'cancel culture' (it's sister) zeros in on comedy for one simple reason - it knows it is too vulnerable to being satirized. So it will attempt to smother comedy by neutering its audience, university students for example, or the platform by which it's delivered - Netflix (as in Chappelle).
Comedy flourished behind the Iron Curtain. But like all real comedy the Soviet version was highly subversive and it was an underground phenomenon—circulating, for example, in the form of jokes. Here are a few specimens:
What's the difference between a capitalist fairy tale and a Marxist fairy tale?
A capitalist fairy tale begins, "Once upon a time, there was....". A Marxist fairy tale begins, "Some day, there will be...."
Is it true that the Soviet Union is the most progressive country in the world?
Yes, of course! Life was already better yesterday than it's going to be tomorrow!
Khrushchev visits a pig farm and is photographed there. Later there's a discussion In the newspaper office about how to caption the picture. "Comrade Khrushchev among pigs," "Comrade Khrushchev and pigs," and "Pigs surround comrade Khrushchev" are all rejected as politically offensive. Finally, the editor announces his decision: "Third from left: Comrade Khrushchev."
Totalitarian regimes are very sensitive to the subversive potential of a good joke. That's why Wokedom hates comedy and works so hard to suppress it.
I think that is a funny comment, with some truth. However, in the case of Capitalism exploiting a man, that man gets to participate in the exploitation. :)
As someone who both enjoys comedy a great deal and creates it for public consumption, I can say that the environment in my industry around comedy is not especially inspiring at the moment.
@vaughn -- Not to worry. The wokes will eventually get the government to forgive their loans and pay for their degree in government, gender, grievance or grifting studies.
I went there 30 years ago. I was thinking mainly of the Chicago Principles put out by Pres Zimmer and his general dismissing of requests to disinvite speakers etc. I'm sure there are many students who are happy to cancel each other regardless.
Also, Chodush at Claremont followed-up strong to Zimmer. As did a couple others, all should be praised, they went against the current and had a positive effect.
I hate to even visit the idea upon you, but...have you ever read The Gulag Archipelago? What we are seeing here is a dress rehearsal. It begins with lies. You tolerate the lies. Then you repeat the lies. Then you lie to yourself.
Let's see, what level of question is that? Hmm...sort of like, "Mr. Cassidy, do you still beat or wife?" or maybe "Mr. Cassidy, does your mother know that you are stupid?" I am talking about the current Wokie logic that allows a far too significant group of Americans to continue to believe that trans men should be allowed to destroy womens' sports and/or that there is some genocide perpetrated on minorities from police officers.
“For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed.”
And that was their blinders. Thinking all educated people hated Trump and only stupid people liked Trump. The news really was that black and white on that view.
It’s the idea that smart people live on the coast and stupid hicks live in-land.
Even on the coasts - at least half of 'my circle' is Ivy League or Seven Sister...Smith, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Tufts, Brown, Johns Hopkins...and they voted TRUMP...yup.
Thank you. That's encouraging. Try to find the book, written by two CNN employees, called The Great Revolt. A great experiment to try to understand the Trump voter.
One thing for sure, the Democrats, The Progressives, Leftists,etc still don't 'get it'. Just read the front page of The NYTimes (I for one have cancelled it after 35 years). It's as if they are putting their fingers in their ears. Trump supporters and the issues that drove them to the polls have not gone away.
Trump is an embarrassment and anyone who supports Trump is reviled for not being embarrassed. These are Bobos in paradise, Bourgeois Bohemians, good taste is their cultural currency.
Unfortunately, they wouldn't know good taste if it jumped up and bit 'em in the ass. That's what's so pathetic--the ultra-lame parochialism of how they view the world. They remind me of listening to the utter inanity of aristocrats, commenting on the world around them with zero understanding.
Because they are all so poorly educated (in spite of their "pedigrees"), they know nothing about anything worth knowing: they substitute snark for wit, they label any POS as art, they can't write, they have no empathy because they've never done a lick of real work, with real people. It's an entire generation where vapid horseshit is the only product. All their precious races and genders, etc all crapping in a big funnel that releases only toxic sludge.
I know he says he is a conservative but that’s a platitude, kinda hollow. NYT needs too feign diversity of opinion, he is fully committed to their Overton window, what Wesley Yang calls the “Vertically integrated messaging apparatus “.
I hope your optimism is justified. Major episodes of mass hysteria ended only because external factors intervened, not because they were bound to collapse.
Nazi Germany, an example of mass hysteria gripping the bulk of the German and Austrian population, as well as significant segments in France, ended only because of external forces: the Allied success in the war. Had Britain faltered in 1940, it might have reached a diplomatic agreement which left that regime in place.
Mass hysteria in China, starting with the personality cult in the 1950s did not end until the late 1970s.
Well true but look at the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism. Salem lasted about a year (witch hysteria much longer) and eventually ended because it just became too ridiculous - they accused the governor's wife of witchcraft. The same thing happened with McCarthyism. once he began accusing members of the military...that is when it all came toppling down. I have thought more than once that we might have arrived at the "it's just too ridiculous to last" moment but so far that hasn't happened.
True but even then... McCarthy tried to extend his campaign to the military and the threat that it would lead to a coup brought greater forces to defeat him. Today, the woke have taken the upper levels of the military, as one can see from the Navy recommended reading list
Salem witch trials happened around the time of the English Civil War, which had significant religious components. After the Restoration Charles II tried to defuse these with greater tolerance, leading to the end of witch burning in England and its colonies.
It's hard to see these episodes of fanaticism burning out on their own, with people realizing the insanity of their behavior.
One ray of hope is the courage of some individuals, like Bari Weiss and yourself, to take great risks against such opponents to defend individual freedom and tolerance.
And it won't happen so long as so many people don't understand woke absurdity to be the inevitable endgame of identity politics. You can't fix this problem while continuing to support its root cause.
After Mao's death, in other words. In our case, the half-senile gerontocracy of Biden et al. has to pass from the scene. It's the constant caving-in of the gerontocrats and older Boomers that gives this movement the momentum it has. Like the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it's not a youth movement, appearances apart. It's been engineered from the top down and by the older on the younger.
Jesus, that comment on the Allied success in the WWII inevitably makes my blood boil in the same vein both Peters’ blood (presumably) was boiling about the lack of mention of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the role of Hollywood history (museum). The Allied forces arrived to pick a cherry on a cake after the generation of my selfless Soviet grandparents paid the butcher bill in the World War II fighting for two long years, (before the Allied arrival, and two long years after their arrival); pushing the Nazi back, while taking the stab in the back from their own government. In moments like this I feel that USA has fully deserved its fate by betraying the legacy of the Russian (Soviet) people who made the victory over Nazism possible.
The Allies in WW2 *** always*** refers to the Big Three: USSR, UK, US and was always mentioned that way in Churchill's 6 volume The Second World War.
Churchill himself described the Eastern Front as the "First Front", in comparison to the planned Second Front in Normandy. It is an unfortunate US-centricism that refers to the Allies as just US and UK, and to Eisenhower as "the man who defeated Hitler", one to which any serious history buff takes exception.
Adam Tooze's study of the Nazi economy showed the German Army had an average of 40,000 deaths /month on the Eastern Front and that in October 1941 his Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, had a meeting with Hitler to inform him that the war could no longer be won by military means.
It was clear by mid-1943, after the Battle of Kursk, that the Red Army would be able to win the war on its own: Germany's official policy in the East became one of "strategic retreat" and Stalin toned down his requests for an Allied landing in France, as it would allow his armies to advance further into Europe.
That said, it is worth remembering that much of the Soviet losses were caused by Stalin's military ineptitude. His refusal to abandon Kiev in Sept 1941 led to 650,000 Soviet prisoners. His insistence of an wide-ranging offensive on January 5, 1942, after the victory at the Battle of Moscow, spread Soviet forces too thin and led to its defeat. In both cases Stalin was strongly contradicted by Gen Zhukov, the top Soviet (and Allied) commander of the war.
I certainly did not intend my comment the way you interpreted it, as just US and UK, and in my home we always celebrate November 19 as a great day. "Send a messenger to collect some fur gloves", Anthony Beevor, "Stalingrad".
Thank you for your long explanation, it returned my blood pressure back to normal. ;) I have a short fuse when it comes to the matters of WWII, because most of us, the Soviets grew up in the debris of that war, with every field trip starting elementary school involving the description of the Nazi atrocities on our land. So, when I arrived to the US as a scholar in 1998 and learnt what they teach here I was... shocked. I guess, I just never recovered from neither and now enter a PTSD trajectory every time I see a capital 'W' twice.... I appreciate your thoughtful attention to my comment!
I mean, the French and British weren't late to the fight (and neither were us Canadians I might add!!)
It was very specifically the Americans who were late to the party, but they tipped the scales (and don't they know it). The Nazis had to ease up on the Eastern Front once they were fighting American reinforcements on the Western Front.
That's not true: the German Army had 3/4 of its strength on the Eastern Front from June 1941 through the end of the war, measured both in men and in armor (see Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction").
Soviet T34 (and later T34-85) tanks were considerably superior to any in the US and UK inventory as well as most German designs, for which reason the Soviets requested not to receive any US or British tanks as part of Lend-Lease. Soviet armor operations, one recovered from Stalin's purges, proved more innovative than Germany's and led to massive encirclements at Stalingrad and in Bielorrussia and Ukraine; nothing of the sort happened on the Western Front.
The real Western contribution was the destruction of Germany's airforce, mainly during Big Week in Feb 1944, and the destruction of Germany's industry during the Strategic Air Offensive.
It's sobering to remember that Germany had 700,000 soldiers fighting partisans in the Balkans, 1,000,000 soldiers in France during D-Day, and 4 million soldiers on the Eastern Front.
Many popular books on the war in the East, by John Erickson, David Glantz, Richard Overy, Anthony Beevor are available. Erick Ziemcke has published a two-volume summary of the US Army study of that campaign.
An enjoyable read, for me, at least, of 6-7 of those books would definitely leave you better informed that you appear to be now.
Not true at all: the Germans started losing at the Battle of Stalingrad (Nov 19, 1942 - Jan 30, 1943).
That defeat, the greatest German defeat in recorded history since Julius Ceasar, had such an effect that for one month German radio stations could only broadcast somber music by Brahms and Beethoven.
By July 1943 the German summer offensive was crushed at the Battle of Kursk, the first time this had ever happened. After that the official German policy on the Eastern Front was "strategic retreat".
American involvement up to mid-1943 was limited to North Africa, a peripheral campaign as far as the Germans were concerned, undertaken only because Hitler was concerned about his Italian ally.
Well-read folks on WW2 in the Eastern Front are aware winter was a minor concern in July 1943 at the Battle of Kursk, where the bulk of Germany's armored force was destroyed.
Despite the polls, most people I know who despise illiberalism are well educated --masters, Ph.D.s., at least college. But so do my electrician and plumber. They count, too. Part of the problem is use of words like "elite." The activist class construes it literally and clearly -- comically -- thinks itself superior. Are radical identitarians really an "aristocracy"? The endless stream of vin ordinaire commenters, anchors in name only, and one-dimensional activists? More apt appellations are Party hacks, conformists. The Big Cheese propagandists are commissars. Education has become confused or synonymous with indoctrination --the latter virtually never a sign of a superior intelligence, which resists same.
"For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed.": -- Excuse me @Sasha Stone - what makes you think the moral puritans on the left are "educated"? I have met many of them all over the country and throughout the years. They are generally uneducated or quasi-educated, with little understanding of history and absolutely no understanding of economics and barely any of the sciences. They have no knowledge of rigorous philosophy, except for the popular stuff they read in literature.
To call these people "educated" just goes to show that they are good in masquerading and pretending to be knowledgeable individuals. They are anything but. Let's not insult people here by calling the typical leftist or worse the typical woke "educated".
I'll add that, in spite of their Ivy League cargo cult, they are also virtually innumerate, and most have never taken an actual college-level hard science class of any kind
Great insight. I wonder if it's time for a new alternative entertainment industry centered somewhere in "flyover country" that serves the silent majority of the country that is fed up with the BS from Hollywood. I would pay for that.
Hollywood produces whatever sells. Always has, always will. So, tell me, what movies do "flyover country" want to see that Hollywood refuses to produce?
I wish. I'd be rich. I'm asking because Mr. Block claims that Hollywood doesn't make films the "silent majority" in "flyover country" would enjoy. So I asked him to detail what kind of films he thinks Hollywood should make that "flyover country" would enjoy, but doesn't. I've lived in "flyover country" all my life and believe I am well served by Hollywood's offerings. But he's welcome to show me all the movies I've been missing.
You were (and are) far more a part of the problem than you realize, even today. You have not abandoned the beliefs whose consequences you complain about.
Well it's a complicated thing. I don't think pushing for inclusion back when I was doing it, around 2011, was wrong. It never made sense to me that there was such a white wall that could not be penetrated. And it didn't matter how much I wrote about it the general public was starting to notice and when Twitter came around the complaints against them got louder. I don't regret my contribution to making change. Some of that change has been a positive for the Oscars and for Hollywood. Times were changing and the Oscars had to change with them. But it went too far. Now it has gone too far. So I'm trying to do my part to bring things back. It might be too late. This movement was happening all over the country in 2013 and 2014 on college campuses and everywhere else. The Oscars were a sitting duck, like every other institution in this country, with or without my coverage.
Identity politics cannot have good results. So long as you diagnose "racism" via simple bean-counting rather than by scrutinizing methodology, you will contribute to similar problems. Wokeness is not a fluke; it's the only way identity politics can ever end.
If you think a specific black performer lost an award to an inferior white performer in a specific instance, speak against that injustice. That could be valid. But to say "there are too few black winners!" can never have good outcomes. If you don't realize that yet, then you will remain part of the problem.
Well with due respect, I'm not sure you understand fully what I think. I was telling you what I thought previously and that I do not regret that. Ultimately I am not a supporter of equity. Even in the past I advocated for films I thought were good enough but that were not getting the recognition they deserved because of baked in bias, which is obvious, especially when people win who do not deserve to win. I've been covering the Oscars for 20 years and I can give you plenty of examples of how it's a popularity contest more than it is anything else. Films win for a variety of reasons that don't necessarily mean the best film won. In general the Oscars themselves have tried to vote for movies they believed told a righteous message, like even Crash or Driving Miss Daisy. I have never advocated for someone to win because they were black. Winning is about gaining a consensus and gaining a consensus is often about falling in love with a person for a season. This has been true throughout Oscar history. What I saw were better performances go overlooked to favor the white actors again and again and again and again. You see that enough times and you begin to feel frustrated. Right now I don't feel that way, though I do think one black actress winning in 94 years of Oscar history is, um, shall we say kind of a glaring problem. But what we're talking about is different from what this piece here by Bari Weiss is about. It isn't about picking winners for the Oscars. It is about the entire industry losing its mind to a fundamentalist religion. If you think I am part of the problem then so be it. I've been on both sides of the issue and I have never exactly had a huge amount of respect for film awards. Not ever. Most of the time I've been covering them I do so knowing that the best do not win. It is a bigger picture than you make it out to be. It isn't just about what YOU think deserves to win. It is about what thousands think. Do I think they should vote based on woke doctrine? No. But do I think hardly any black actors would win if they didn't? Probably. I've written enough about this subject going on 15 years now. I don't really want to write much more here but just to say - my conscience is clean. Doesn't mean I don't want to encourage people to speak out, be honest and make good art again. I do.
Sasha, my 2 cents is that if both extremes hate you, you're probably doing something right.
Ideally, you want the woke left to think you're a fascist, and the MAGA right to think you're a communist. That's the best indicator that you're sticking with "Common Sense", as Bari puts it.
Liberal agrees with far righter. And the sky turned to fire . . .
Inclusion is always better. But since most institutions do not change until forced--the military wasn't integrated until Harry Truman ordered it so--how do you propose to get them to be inclusive voluntarily?
I know the difference. Liberals want to use government *appropriately.* That can be zero, minimal, maximal, or something in between, depending on the situation and need.
Minimize or eliminate it in some cases--we have 50 state departments of education, no reason to have a federal one. Maximize it in others--ensure taxes are collected from everyone who owes them, ensure criminals are prosecuted, ensure corporations do not break our laws in their natural pursuit of profits--i.e., Enron, Wells Fargo, and the S&L industry.
Does that mean imposing behavior? Sure, when the situation warrants. Speed limits impose behavior. Banning toxic waste from being dumped in our rivers imposes behavior. Arresting rioters and looters on the left and the right imposes behavior. There is nothing wrong with imposing behavior per se.
Liberals care only that the power of government and business do not abuse innocent people, who should be left alone as much as possible. At least this liberal cares about that.
Because it's not an abandonment of the toxic principles that caused the problem; it's only a complaint about their consequences. The post I replied to clearly includes a defense of identity politics, provided that they don't manifest in ways the writer finds harmful.
"Real communism hasn't been tried" isn't just a pithy right-wing retort - it's a description of the fact that the holders of toxic ideologies forever describe the inevitable consequences of their ideologies as a perversion of their ideologies rather than their natural result.
There's a distinction between principles and ideologies. Principles can conflict, and tradeoffs need to be managed. Ideologies are primarily driven by denialism about tradeoffs.
There's plenty of room in between "real communism hasn't been tried" and "the soviet union was bad so I guess the poor can all go fuck themselves"
Your definitions of "principles" and "ideologies" are not common, nor have you actually defined a defensible distinction.
Your second paragraph is an absurdity; the notion that there is a relationship between caring about the poor and supporting communism is a communist lie.
A principle would be "income inequality shouldn't be allowed to spiral out of control". An ideology would be "when it comes to fighting inequality, the ends always justify the means"
You complaining that Sasha hasn't abandoned all her principles says more about you than her.
Ok you make your point well - bad ideology must be renounced not just bad outcome. That said I have a lot of sympathy for Sasha Stone’s new found realization that the well intended and laudable quest for inclusion and diversity has gone insane and begun cannibalizing itself. Baby steps I suppose.
Do you understand that even a nuclear-strength critique of Progressive Wokeism and its endless disasters does not make one a conservative? It's just an affirmation of one's socio-political sanity.
I get that, being a centrist liberal who shit-talks wokeness constantly. Seriously devout conservatives, like JDFree, think people like me and Sasha are half-assing it by not going full-blown right wing.
"For the mostly educated" who are actually mostly braindead and clueless, Hillary Clinton "deserved" to take Bernie's nomination and "deserved" to be the first woman president. Think about that for a moment. I still am amazed that "educated" people can't see that Trump was a symptom, not a root case.
Woke is just the latest Marxist incarnation. It, just as all things created using Marx's ideas will destroy everything it touches just as Stalin killed both opponents and supporters alike once they had outlived their usefulness or stepped one step outside his orthodoxy. Even Yezhov was killed once he knew to much. This is what will happen to "Wokewood".
“Rochée Jeffrey, a black writer on “Grownish,” “Santa Inc.,” and “Woke,” said: “I don’t care if white people aren’t comfortable because black people are uncomfortable all the fucking time.”
———————————————
This is my favorite new phenomenon. It is a combination of pathological narcissism and racism. Maybe call it racissism?
😂😂😂
As a narcissist, this guy thinks that since he feels uncomfortable, everyone else who is black must feel uncomfortable……because he also believes that all black people are the same. Awesome. Good stuff.
(It’s also possible that he is lying about feeling uncomfortable and he is just using that as a weapon to dominate people by exploiting their empathetic response. I think that’s called sociopathy.)
A few years ago, Starbucks closed all their stores for a day or racial-resentment training after a manager in Philadelphia had attempted to enforce company policy. One of the training videos showed a black guy saying he was afraid to leave his house and then showed a white guy saying he just leaves the house and does his thing whenever he feels like it. Thank you, Howard Schultz, for your contribution to our national healing.
You hit the nail on the head: a primary feature of narcissism is that other people are responsible for the way you feel. I've had to ingest white Millennial faculty claim that their whiteness causes harm. Well, blackness causes harm too. It could even cause MORE harm. But they turn it on white behavior, label that wrong, and insist white people do what -- not act "white"? Well then should we act "black"? What would that do? The whole thing is so ridiculously stupid it's a wonder anyone is falling for it.
“I’ve had to ingest white millennial faculty claim that their whiteness causes harm.”
—————————————
This is also a manifestation of narcissism. When you believe you are the center of the universe you perceive that you have an outsized impact on everything around you.
Would you include in the payers a white whose parents immigrated to the US in 1970? This reparations game is a huge scam and lacks any rational basis. You rail against the woke insanity but embrace one of its core values of victimization. Just for giggles, take a look at the 100 richest people in America. Almost no inherited wealth and few, if any, whose wealth originated from slavery. This is just a giant con game and smart people such as you shouldn't be complicit in it.
Pal Joey? The working guy from Scranton? Tamer of Corn Pop? Savior of Mandela? The guy who said "if you don't vote for me yo ain't black?" That Joey? A descendant of slavers?
“Almost no one inherited wealth…”. Maybe, if emphasis is on word “inherited”, but most got a big leg up with high six or seven figure loans from parents or friends for their first ventures. Bootstraps are bullshit.
Jeff Bezos was born to a teen mom in New Mexico. Only 16% of millionaires inherited more than $100,000 and 3% inherited over $1 million.
You must just not know any rich people. That’s fine. I know a lot of them. Only a small fraction are spoiled inheritance brats and most of them end up like Hunter Biden because it’s the same as a government welfare program.
You’ve been manipulated by propaganda. Even if your assertion was based in fact, the only way to solve it would be totalitarianism.
Again, I didn’t say anything about inheriting anything. I know many rich people, am a graduate of an Ivy League college and law school myself. Most of my fellow students who weren’t on scholarship weren’t taking out loans and their parents had often paid for years of boarding schools and travel and sports. Yet they didn’t see themselves as privileged.
Most of these entrepreneurs get large loans from friends and family. Most startups aren’t just one dude writing code in his garage before cashing in.
NO. I grew up in a van down by the river on the outskirts of Appalachia. I'm done with 'uber-compassionate' Liberals "helping" me. 90% of it has always been about them getting their dopamine hits, while making a comfortable living off of their 'oh so massive' compassion.
What makes people who they are in life is how they play the hand that they are dealt. But there is a tribe of people that get So Freaking High off of taking that option away from other people.
There is a reason people compete for the title of "most empathetic". It makes them feel good. It's an addiction. On more levels than one.
What kinds of solutions could have evolved from the ground up if the anointed hadn't been forcing their own self-serving panaceas down our throats?
It's one thing to lend a hand, (10%) and entirely another to play God (90%). And don't think for a second that people that have zero experience with money are going to have have a clue how to use your reparations. (I'd go long on doordash, fentanyl, purple drink and Nike.)
Guess the uber-compassionate will have to build up another huge Leviathan like apparatus to monitor and supervise the reparations process, with an 80% set aside for "administrative processes". Yum yum, more dopamine hits and cushy jobs for the "anointed"! More marshmallows, peanuts and circuses for the "unfortunate" among us. But don't it feel good?
See Also famous Black leaders: Du Bois (who was terrible & BLM celebrates) vs. Booker T. Washington (who was awesome & BLM vilifies)
Washington believed Blacks should work hard, study hard, be good citizens, have economic independence and create wealth for themselves, while Du Bois created NAACP and believed in fighting the system for rights via laws & mandates. Du Bois was a Pan-Africanist & Socialist.
Some of us, being all too familiar with American history, hold the opinion that both approaches were necessary, and important. I mean, as if the State oppression of de jure segregation was ever going to be overthrown without "fighting the system via laws and mandates." Much of the oppression that W.E.B. Du Bois fought took the form of "laws and mandates" (particularly in various State law codes); none of it was going to be overturned without challenges in the arena of the law courts. A battle much more arduous than it should have been.
It's worth noting that Ibram X. Kendi doesn't think much of either Du Bois or Booker Washington. As Kendi editorializies in his book Stamped From The Beginning, which is part (mostly accurate) history and part (terribly flawed) polemic, they're both too "assimilationist" to meet his imperious presentist/essentialist standards.
The big ad agencies on both coasts are contributing to this wokism too. They’re creating ads featuring every couple as biracial or gay or minority as if the whole country is representative of that. But these ad agencies are run by leftist white guys who live in Tribeca and make millions of bucks to misrepresent America’s demographics to fulfill a quota. It’s funny actually.
Yup - seems like everyone in commercials is black today…and fashion photography is mostly black too - doesn’t reflect the country and lots of people note this. A friend’s daughter just signed with a modeling agency - in South Korea! because she couldn’t get work in the USA. #NotMyCountry
While I don't care about inter-racial marriage but watching these ads one would think it was the majority of American marriages. The white guys with obvious biracial kids populating these commercials is so out of step with reality. Wondering if that is the case in China, Japan or other nations or are we prone to depicting the world as we hope it should be or as it is?
In any event this trend is provokes laughter and derision whenever it comes up in conversation. Even POC can see the pandering as insulting. BTW many black African American women are not amused when seeing white woman hooked up with black men. Might be a supply and demand thing. Might even be a feeling of being marginalized by this idea of the "white Queen" being idealized as the preferred partner by Black men.
And in the few commercials that have white people, every white male is stupid (the white dude with the Prius and the fish bowl on the roof) or a fool (ATT with the white guy whose kids get lollipops asking the ATT woman for a lollipop). There is another ATT ad with a dippy soy white guy with a dopey blonde spouse/GF, so the white, blonde is also on the hit list. We just laugh...
Well we all could go on for hours with the silly and stupid depictions of white guys. Now we might know how some Black folks felt about the Amos and Andy show and other negative stereotypes. Love the one where the guy with the cracked windshield says nothing while his wife takes charge and pays while he stands by mute. Sure that happens all the time in the average American household.
More often than not, the white women who are with black men are the ones who got rejected by white men.
OkCupid did a study on racial dating preferences. Most people prefer to date within their race. When dating outside of race, white men & white women were most preferred by everyone. White women overwhelmingly want white men. White men want white women. And Asian women CHASE HARD after white men. The black men seemed to prefer white women but white women did not prefer black men. Meaning, a white women with a black man is more likely not with her preferred choice of partner. A white man with an Asian woman, same thing.
There are some Asian women who reject Asian men & only hunt hard after white men. Not sure why. IRL, the white guys who I've seen end up with Asian women are typically the nerdier type, shy type, the guys who are not the ones out there making the first move. Thus, what ends up happening is these Asian women who have white man fetish make the first move & hit on the guy, so he ends up with her.
Not funny. Infuriating. And I think if many of these companies tried to survive on the revenue from blacks or gays alone, they would wither. It’s time to start fighting back with our dollars.
Well, we don't do much about it so maybe we are. After all, what would a rational majority of a nation do if medical care were withheld from them solely on the basis of race? Nations have descended into homicidal near genocide based on far less, or just perceived, slights in the last few decades - witness Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
"After all, what would a rational majority of a nation do if medical care were withheld from them solely on the basis of race?"
Unfortunately, I read recently that the wokesters are considering doing exactly that -- using race as one of the criteria for deciding on whether or not you will get medical treatment for covid.
What irritates me to no end are all the men wearing expensive women's clothes in the ads that appear in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. I think that's a major turn off for many women. What biological woman wants to look like a drag queen? Speaking of Vanity Fair, it's gone down the drain since the new editor in chief, a diversity hire, was put in place. Circulation must be down sharply. The current subscription price is only $8 per year with a free tote bag. I'm sure it's on its last legs.
Re “the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.”
Sad but true. I avoid newer movies and television. I know that it is fiction, but it's exhausting. None of these people are like me or interact like me and all of my friends. And for some reason, proper English has disappeared (pity Sidney Poitier now).I find that even science fiction movies inhabit this universe of "woke". I can only buy so much fantasy at once.
On television I find it hard to believe that almost every couple is either bi-racial or gay or "fluid" or unhappy. The percentages don't work for me.
And the remakes where they pop a woman in to replace a male. Sheer pandering. Write your own story and I won't care if the person has zebra stripes.
And the ads are all black now. Do they seriously think the white viewers relate best to mixed race or all-black couples (note that mixed race is always black husband and white wife, never the other way around because...reasons...)? I think of myself as "colorblind" but I have to admit that when I see these woke, pandering types of ads, I feel a momentary rush of irritation at the politics of it, and then resolve never to buy that product. Multiply by 50 million.
As for sci-fi and fantasy... don't get me started. They have taken every Golden Age comic book and turned them into woke political messaging vehicles.
Precisely. Gillette got in big trouble a couple of years ago with their stupid "toxic masculinity" commercial and suffered multi-billion dollar losses. By the way, what's the significance of the little purple design next to your icon?
yeah. black people are only 12% (1/8) of the US population so having them in 100% of ads is NOT representative. If 1/8 was black, that would be correct representation.
and LGBTQ+ is like 5-8% of US population, so 1/12 would be LGBT correctly represented.
An alien, or Rip can Winkle type, who watched current American TV / movies for a couple days to learn about our culture would be left with a completely fantasy-land idea of what the US is like today in terms of culture, demographics, behavior, etc.
I have friends living in Germany, and what they know about our politics is a reflection of USA leftist views repeated in their mass media. And they are watching our TV shows, I am having fun asking what is proportion of blacks here, 25-30% is common answer. I wonder how many fellow Americans think the same!
Ha, before I first came to the US some 20 years ago I thought it was even more based on watching US movies where the main characters where typically 1white 1black.
yup. black people are only 12% (1/8) of the US population so having them in 100% of shows is NOT representative. If 1/8 was black, that would be correct representation.
and LGBTQ+ is like 5-8% of US population, so 1/12 would be LGBT correctly represented.
Absolutely spot on. I stopped watching new movies a few years ago because they were so dreadfully woke, I couldn't stand it. I enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Man in the High Castle. But the fourth was so laughably woke, I turned it off after the first twenty minutes. I'm sure they fired all the old writers and hired a bunch of the new faces whose only qualification was their demographic data. The casting of TV commercials today is so heavy handed and bizarre, it's like they used a bingo machine to put couples together. If I want to see a movie on amazon prime, I've got to go back at least three decades for find something watchable.
Very interesting and a lot shadenfreudey. Personally I could not care less about the hypocritical and whiny entertainment industry. Right now I’m watching Boston Legal and even 15 years ago Hollywood was woke. Ah well.
Hey, has anyone noticed white people aren’t in commercials anymore? Only black people climb mountains and go to the beach and do all the things white people used to do but don’t anymore. And all couples are either totally black or mixed race. And if a white person is in a commercial they’re stupid while the professionals are black. Yeah that’s believable. Sad what the woke are doing. Meanwhile the inner city schools are dreadful and POC are still being used and discarded by the left.
Oh and White Lotus was stupid and I didn’t even bother to finish the last couple of episodes.
I did see Asians about in restaurants and at the airport. One sitting in front of me on the plane wore a t-shirt that read, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ on the front and ‘Lions not sheep’ on the back!!!
We moved here following 25+ years in Silicon Valley, which is somewhere around 50% Asian, way more like %75 in cities like Cupertino and Fremont. Let me let you in on a little secret: They are not woke. They are pursuing the dream and they are succeeding. One of my law partners is first generation from Taiwan. He likes to hunt animals and has a CC permit (in California - not easy to do). Proggies have a hard time dealing with Asians because they have "brown" skin but do not fit the skin color is everything narrative. And, I have bad news for proggies: Asians are 60% of the world's population.
Indeed. I've tuned out. Two examples: I now DVR my Kansas City Chief's football games and watch them skipping the commercials because I can't stand the wokery on the commercials, and only-white-men-can-be-clowns casting. Secondly, I've discovered Korean and Taiwanese romantic comedies and period pieces on Netflix -- actually very witty writing, well-enough acting, and good-enough production values, and (big thumbs up) absolutely no explicit sex. It's like stepping back into 1960's television like "I Dream of Gennie" or "The Lucy Show." Granted the casts are all of one race, but that's not the point -- all you see is the story.
The entertainment industry hasn't been very entertaining for quite some time; it has finally accelerated to the point that it's not entertaining at all.
My nephew (semi reliable child) told me that the new 007 will be a black female. I concede the designation is transferable. I also asked him if she would be well dressed, drinking martinis, smoking and making passes at young women. He accused me, yes me, of being sarcastic.
I used to love movies, but the last ten years or so, I've stopped paying attention to what's coming out. When you hire based on anything besides skill (writing skill, reading-the-room skill, skill at actually knowing how people live), and you hire people who only got there because of a set of grievances (grievances they have every motivation to keep going, even if they have been addressed and are being addressed), you end up with either (1) preachy propagandistic films or (2) regurgitated reboots (or they might as well be reboots, because you can play the "what classic movie did they steal that from" game while you're watching). No one seems to know how to tell a story anymore, because the story is not really the point.
Now I read. Books are not free of the above, but they're freer.
I find the same thing in some books. So what I do is find the authors contact info and brace them on it usually with something like why would you dismiss half your audience so you can virtue signal and feel good. Honestly, it’s like they’ve never thought about that before. And what do you know, some have even written back and acknowledged what they did was stupid.
You know who doesn’t give you the time of day when called on their bias? Wall St Journal reporters, the same 280 ones that sent the letter to the Ed board shrieking about their bias.
I never thought about writing to the authors. I just don't buy more of their books. There are so many good authors to pick from, ones that really just want to tell a good story or reveal something *real* about the human condition. And, yes, I've noticed there are self-labelled conservatives that blend in quite well with the virtue-signalers.
Me too; trying to ween myself off Fox news clips and conservative commentators on Youtube and spend more time reading. I have like 10 books in my Alibris shopping cart right now, waiting for the next coupon to hit :)
That story could be about academia as well. The path out of embedded woke-ism is hard to see in industries where 90+ percent of the workers and management are from the left and far left. This reads like a science fiction description of some sort of soft Stalinism.
It seems to have infected office worker culture everywhere too. Even big construction companies have monthly DEI messaging from HR. I'll be damned if I ever leave the field and end up dealing with that crap in the office full time.
Having moved to the office, the HR fluff is easier to tune out than you think. That said, if employees start getting conscripted into mandatory diversity/sensitivity training sessions, then it's time to update the ol' resume.
Not so soft Stalinism when professors of medicine have to issue public apologies for using the term "pregnant women". The woke term is "birthing people", a step too far even for Stalin's favorite geneticist Trofym Lysenko.
"Archie Bunker—the main character—“is basically a Trump voter,” a producer explained."
Bullshit. I can say with a high level of certainty that the vast majority of Trump voters care more about your rights than you care about theirs, and probably more than you care about your own.
Just because you created the "Trump voter caricature" does not mean you got it right. So get over yourself. When you live in a fake world for so long, you begin to think it is real.
I am not the least bit disappointed to see Hollywood, the great land of pretend and pretension, in such a state. As Miles stated in the earlier response, we are past the point of hypotheticals. And your industry will likely die a slow death as a result.
One thing Hollywood makes clear time and time again is that, every time they create an alleged conservative character, they make it crystal clear that they have absolutely NO CLUE whatsoever who or what a conservative really is, really thinks, really believes.
I'm pretty sure "you" is those dumb Hollywood creators and not the writers of this blog (Peter and Peter). Just making sure :)
Yes there is a weird kind of ignorant stereotype among the left which manifests as twisted cartoons, descriptions, phony anecdotes, etc., all attempting to paint conservatives as evil people.
Strangely, many of the left are flocking to Florida to enjoy the open, mandate-free environment and get away from the high crime and dysfunctional social conditions of their own miserable blue cities and states. Hopefully they will just spend some money then leave, and not stay to f*** up their clean new place as they did the old one.
Correct. But I wouldn't call them dumb as much as willfully ignorant.
I'm also trying to figure out where the Yellowstone/1883 emergence fits in this. Both series seem to be harkening back to the "old school" of hard work, sacrifice, and self-reliance (granted, Yellowstone takes that to an extreme) and both series seem to be resonating extremely well. While I wouldn't call either one "anti-woke", they are both, at best, ambivalent to "wokeness". Has the dearth of such messages over the last 10 years created a thirst for them now?
Taylor Sheridan is the producer of Yellowstone. He just recently purchased the 6666 Ranch in Texas. He is telling authentic stories that interest many people who have not been previously exposed to this life style. He has done a great job of integrating diversity & inclusion in the show (the bunk house on Dutton Ranch has 3 women and 1 man of color - in addition to the dreaded white man). There are also Native Americans represented well. BUT - he is accomplishing this by being authentic in the stories, not shoving it down people’s throats.
I'm guessing the 6666 ranch will replace Hollywood as the major movie production location in the US in the next 10 years. It is HUGE. I think the line used by John Dutton in one of the episodes from early in season 4 (?) about their ranch needing to generate income from sources other than cattle was as much, or more, about the 6666 ranch.
And you are right about the authenticity angle - the characters are so believable (Teeter is great, as are Mo and Rainwater). I'm not sure how he does it, but Sheridan certainly captures that lifestyle very well. His work on 1883 is amazing.
My wife and I just started breed reining quarterhorses, and the market for them has really heated up in the last year. Rumor has it Sheridan is driving the market right now. I'm sure it will come down in the next few years, but for now it's way up there. (We got into the business before the market went up so don't have unrealistic expectations!)
Bragg was elected, and not picked by Adams. But Adams just lost any confidence that I had in him when he justified giving his brother a $240K job in NYPD because "I need special protection from white supremacists".
Funny aside: The woke have invaded the UK as well, but there the ‘indigenous people’ are white. Interestingly, UK blacks in entertainment seem better spoken and better integrated into the culture than US blacks to its culture. The (UK) Graham Norton show remains a wonderful respite of good humor amongst the plethora of types in entertainment.
Mighty white of you to say so. :-) There is a phrase to make the woke blood boil.
In the UK the divides are class and regional. For a long time working class or regional accents or words were never/rarely heard on the national TV or radio stations. That has gradually changed in the last 30 years. Oddly enough that didn't seem to apply to Irish accents. Since the 60s there have always been a few Irish entertainers/broadcasters on the BBC, most famously Terry Wogan.
I expect that Latinos will. Not that there is really any such thing. I've always thought it odd that a Spanish person who goes direct to the US is white, but if they go through Mexico they are a POC.
Fun clip. My surname 'namesake' grandfather (great x 5) arrived to the US in 1827 and did quite well for himself, starting what became quite a large quarry and memorial stone business in New England. No matter, it would take almost a hundred years, until Kennedy became President for the Irish to get some respect. But then as a Bostonian, I went on to marry a Jew whom would be the reason, at least someone told me (in the early-1980'S) that I'd never be invited to 'polite society', meaning Brahmin Society WASP society. It's a dog-eat-dog world, no? : )
Are you going to do anything for the 200th anniversary of his arrival? I wonder how many descendants he has.
I think the protestant Irish got integrated/respected quicker. I only know bits of it, but it is interesting how the Irish gradually moved up the ladder from the bottom rung of society.
Not sure why they seem to integrate into the culture better. Could it be that British culture is much more distinct than America’s polyglot culture!? I thought it was hilarious when about a year ago some British wokesters attacked ‘gardening’ as ‘too white’ - of course, that went nowhere being one of the UK’s favorite pastimes. The woke will try to destroy everything they don’t want to work for or can’t have seems like!?
The UK has its own polyglot culture. The national dish is curry and the national (non-alcoholic) drink is tea. Both came to the UK from India. The culture in the north is very different to the south, southerners can't even understand a Scottish accent. There are millions of immigrants, there has been since the 1850s. It is as much a melting-pot as the US. One difference is that every immigrant group is tiny compared to the total population, so unless there is a constant supply of new people the immigrant group melts away. The black population is mostly from the Caribbean and came into the UK in the 1960s.
1. You can drag a horse to water, but you can't make him watch your shitty product.
2. You can't teach talent, but you can delude almost everyone into believing they have it.
Sooner or later, the industry is going to realize that producing vast amounts of mediocre, derivative, pandering, forced exposition is unsustainable if nobody watches.
There is no way out of this in the immediate future. Teachers are the big problem. Nobody’s more woke than teachers. What do you think your children are being taught. If you want an example of this thinking go downstairs and talk to your daughter: your children. We have raised a generation of McCarthite idiots, incapable of free thought, programed to be on the right side of history and conditioned to ignore the obvious illogic and hypocrisy. I don’t see any way out of this but at least it’s going to destroy Hollywood.
My daughter and son in law took my grandkids to an Asian country for the entirety of their K-12 educations specifically because they don’t want their kids infected by the racial, sexual, anti-knowledge sect running amok in the US.
An extreme example perhaps but I can’t say they were wrong.
I own a large company, in my considerable experience foreign born employees (young adults) are better than Canadian born employees. The Canadian born are victims, they dissolve into a puddle at the first sign of adversity.
You are correct. I spent a year listening to my nephew's on line school in my apartment and discovered what a truly evil person I was and what savage things I was complicit in. They still are the donuts.
Lots of people are commenting on that phenomenon, specifically, ease dropping on their children’s lessons and being shocked at the nonsense they are being taught. Teachers are very strange people they never leave school I think this leads to a certain tunnel vision. Those who can do those who can’t teach, they are not of us.
I consider myself an old-school liberal and I loathe the woke. Therefore, I no longer watch current American films because I refuse to be preached at by snotty, PRIVILEGED millennials of any race or ethnicity. Both the far left and far right are fomenting division and making this country is a cesspool of racial animosity.
I know who the woke are. Who are the far right that are dividing this country, specifically? This is not a both sides do it. One side is massive and extremely well funded and ingrained in all major institutions, academies, and media and the other side, this far right side is what exactly? A handful of pissed off people living in rural America, working class stiffs? With little agency or voice. This “far right” mob where is it and who leads it? Seems to me it is a straw man used to distract.
I agree that the majority of academics and media are woke. However, I will take one example, Tucker Carlson's promotion of "the great replacement theory," a clear dogwhistle to anti-immigrant sentiments. If you cannot see that this is as biased as the woke, then you are only focused on one side of the equation.
You make my case for me. One voice in the media, and on Fox, does not come anywhere near the firepower on the “dominant narrative” side. There is no equivalent “right” side. Singling out a lone voice or two is not equivalence. There is no power institution willing or able to stand up to the left. It is just us “non-narratives”. And that is if we have the courage to speak out and stop supporting the lies. Substack, Rumble, etc. I also think that Tucker pointing out the massive effort to flood the country with illegals is a good thing. Otherwise you would not even know what was happening on the border. Citizenship is good as are borders. But we need to protect both. This country does have a racism problem and it is coming from the left, blatantly.
So where are the lawsuits enforce federal laws against racism? Where is congress standing up to the new racist? The left would already have judicial decisions in their favor against anything they perceive as bad. Where are the lawyers for liberty and freedom, for existing laws? It’s pretty pathetic. No actions.
Any majority European ("white") nation must have demographic changes via immigration to end that status. Canada, USA, EU, Australia, NZ. Russia and some former Soviet states seem alone in avoiding this. Maybe Argentina too.
Any majority non-white nation is fine and there is no call for increased diversity to improve their culture. The rest of the world.
Is that what "great replacement theory" means? Because it doesn't seem so much like a theory as current events.
See what specifically? A few individuals vs corporations and universities, foundations, media, big tech? It’s we the people against the big money now. There is no “far right” institutions of power that exist in this country. Hell even the military is woke. So who are you talking about? Tucker? One guy?
My brother is an Emmy award winning TV a& film editor. Middle aged white guy who has been out of a job for a few years now. I remember when he lived in Hermosa Beach. We are from New Orleans so of course all of the white people in his industry assumed he came from a racist place down south. (Nothing further from the truth in the New Orleans I grew up in) Anyway they used to ask him, wasn’t he happy to be out of the racist south? He would respond with the fact that black & white people actually lived together in NOLA. We mixed in everywhere. We were friends co-workers, went to the same schools, bars, stood next to each other at parades, etc. He said The only black person he ever saw in Hermosa Beach was Shaquille O’Neal playing volleyball. Everywhere he worked in Hollywood was staffed by mostly white people for 25 years. I tend to doubt that was by design but they’ve always been so hypocritical. So now they are overreacting to their own perceived sins.
Hollywood trying to force woke shows down their customer's throats reminds me of the plant based "meat" business. I note that Beyond Meat's stock price has declined from about 196 post IPO (in mid 2019) to about 67 today. No amount of breathless puff pieces in the press are going to get people to pay extra for meat flavored margarine.
I think the bigger frustration is that Hollywood likes to bait-and-switch wokeness into IP that already has a big/popular following, where if the original brand was that nauseatingly woke it would never have become popular in the first place. I suppose an analogy would be McDonalds sneaking Beyond Meat into the Big Mac and hoping nobody complains.
Think major franchises like the MCU and Star Wars, and any book Netflix adapts into a show like Altered Carbon, The Witcher, etc. [edit: almost forgot ghostbusters & charlie's angels]
A British commentator once wrote this about the same trend at the BBC, after they butchered a Watership Down remake into a story about trans-feminist communism:
"Still, it seems to me even more egregious when the BBC trawls through the annals of popular historical fiction, of novels from more than 30 years ago, and ramrods into them its bien pensant obsessions. I would have been much less offended if the BBC had commissioned a writer to confect a story about a group of incredibly woke SJW rabbits, led consensually by a female called perhaps ‘Roz’, who not only liberate a fascistic warren but also open up their own warren to thousands of Iranian rabbit refugees who turn out to be kindly and agreeable and work together with the host population to combat global warming and eradicate poverty.
Nobody would watch such arrant crap, of course, but it would at least be true to itself. But this isn’t done for precisely the reason to which I alluded: nobody would watch it. Instead, the BBC piggybacks on the enormous success and popularity of novels such as Watership Down and warps them until they are unrecognisable."
beyond meat? I got a free promotional Impossible Whopper about a year ago and it was okay, certainly not as good as real beef. The thing is, apparently they make it with "heme", a molecule found in red blood cells, that they have cultured in a lab using an engineered yeast, thus lending it a rather realistic flavor (not sure if that applies to all the types of artificial meats out there). To my mind, it's ridiculous; either eat the real thing, or eat pure vegetarian (plus maybe ovo-lacto). These genetically engineered artificial meats are not natural at all, though they can obviously satisfy someone's cravings when they need to avoid real meat.
There is an allergy referred to as Alpha-Gal (RadioLab did an episode) which can be contracted after a tick bite, in which one is left allergic to meat, including beef, pork, lamb, venison, mutton, goat, and bison. As someone who likes meat and lives in tick country, this was horrifying to hear about. According to the Impossible people, it is safe for those with the allergy, which I find some comfort.
I have been running the Oscar website AwardsDaily.com since 1999. I was one of the leaders pushing for inclusion and diversity starting back in 2001 when Halle Berry became the first black actress (and since, only black actress) to win in the category. It is hard to overstate just how hard it it was for actors, writers and directors to penetrate the white wall. I felt it was my moral duty to change that. But then Trump was elected. Then the community and the left became locked in a kind of mass hysteria. For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed. To them, it had to be about race because everything on the left was about race. We watched the witch hunts start on Twitter, then go after people who had done things, then go after people who had said things, then go after people who thought things. Now we are - in total collapse. I have shifted my own coverage (inspired by Bari Weiss) to push back, to speak out, to teach others not to be afraid of the mob and to encourage Hollywood to do the same. This industry cannot survive this moment. Art cannot survive outrage culture. It is killing everything all in the name of social justice. The Golden Globes being canceled was one of the most chilling things I have ever lived through. None of my colleagues would even acknowledge the winners, which trickled out on social media without an audience, without a show.
I myself have been chased around Twitter, called a White Supremacist and had my business threatened. I have a little Netflix show right now that people have tried to get me fired from - all because I speak my mind. It is like the Red Scare which morphed into the Black List which morphed into the McCarthy trials. Eventually it took Eisenhower to stop the madness.
The fear is palpable everywhere you look, and visible in every single one of their films because the ones that push back on that fear don't even their foot in the door.
Those who control the Democratic Party have the same problem as Hollywood right now. They don't realize that they have become an insulated, isolated aristocracy that uses race and social justice as a way to absolve themselves of the crime of success and privilege (like the Catholics before the Reformation). And in so doing is forced to label more than half the country that doesn't support them, racists.
I keep telling people that this, like all episodes of mass hysteria will end. Make sure when that happens that you were on the right side when the worst of it came down. History will not be kind.
The saddest thing for me was the ‘cancelling’ of comedy. When Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock announced they would not be doing college campuses anymore- that was shocking. And sad.
Wokesters are the unhappiest, most miserable creatures on the planet.
Wokesters are convinced of their moral superiority when in fact - as Andrew Sullivan says in his substack article “Why woke is winning” - wokeness is tribal affiliation with all the self satisfaction that entails: it is cheap simple intolerant intoxicating and as tribalism it is old as the hills.
Cheap virtue sells well apparently.
WOKE will not win in the end; it is bereft of fundamental morality. We just have to wait until it exhausts itself hopefully before it exhausts us all. Kind of like being a parent to a teenager.
This "teenager" is seriously homicidal, mark my words
Well said. Check out Wesley Yang’s sub stack he is the man
We need a Wokies vaccine. Mandated.
That would involve a live virus
Wokeness has been described as a memetic virus, that infects every institution it can coverting them into a wokeness factory and perverting or abandoning there origional purpose. That is how Marxism worked and you can see the scar it left on human civilization from orbit.
They are insane would-be despots
And yet somehow have been put in charge of the entertainment industry. Hard to entertain when you're convinced everything is awful and you hate everyone and yourself. Somehow comedians manage to be self-loathing lunatics AND also very funny, but not so in TV and film.
How right you are. The Woke war on comedy is a tell—it reveals that Wokedom's real objective is to spoil just about everything.
Close, but not quite. What we define as 'woke' or 'political correctness' (it's older brother) or 'cancel culture' (it's sister) zeros in on comedy for one simple reason - it knows it is too vulnerable to being satirized. So it will attempt to smother comedy by neutering its audience, university students for example, or the platform by which it's delivered - Netflix (as in Chappelle).
EXACTLY the same play by the Communists. Every time.
So, how did comedy do in all the communist regimes in the world? Wokies = Communists
Comedy flourished behind the Iron Curtain. But like all real comedy the Soviet version was highly subversive and it was an underground phenomenon—circulating, for example, in the form of jokes. Here are a few specimens:
What's the difference between a capitalist fairy tale and a Marxist fairy tale?
A capitalist fairy tale begins, "Once upon a time, there was....". A Marxist fairy tale begins, "Some day, there will be...."
Is it true that the Soviet Union is the most progressive country in the world?
Yes, of course! Life was already better yesterday than it's going to be tomorrow!
Khrushchev visits a pig farm and is photographed there. Later there's a discussion In the newspaper office about how to caption the picture. "Comrade Khrushchev among pigs," "Comrade Khrushchev and pigs," and "Pigs surround comrade Khrushchev" are all rejected as politically offensive. Finally, the editor announces his decision: "Third from left: Comrade Khrushchev."
Totalitarian regimes are very sensitive to the subversive potential of a good joke. That's why Wokedom hates comedy and works so hard to suppress it.
My favorite is still the priority list at the Prague Hospital Emergency Room after hardline communism was reimposed in 1968 and intellectuals purged:
if victim is a citizen, call the doctor on duty
if victim is party member, call the head of the emergency room
if victim is district party leader, call the chief surgeon
if victim is the national leader, call the night janitor
You forgot to mention that people were arrested and prosecuted for jokes. There was a short period of freedom, and comedy went underground after.
Sure they were. But the jokes just kept on coming.
"Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism it's the other way around."
I think that is a funny comment, with some truth. However, in the case of Capitalism exploiting a man, that man gets to participate in the exploitation. :)
Ha! Perhaps more accurately “socialism is the exploitation of men by a few”
As someone who both enjoys comedy a great deal and creates it for public consumption, I can say that the environment in my industry around comedy is not especially inspiring at the moment.
One more reason NOT to go into $110,000.00 of debt for a degree in Grievance or Gender Studies. Thank God we have Mike Rowe to pick up the pieces.
@vaughn -- Not to worry. The wokes will eventually get the government to forgive their loans and pay for their degree in government, gender, grievance or grifting studies.
College campuses (maybe outside of U Chicago and a handful of others on the free expression side) don't deserve any good entertainment.
What one can conclude is that this is a generation of students who will have little to offer the future.
Not creativity, morality or merit. Or, it would seem, progeny.
Haven't been near the UC English dept. lately, eh? Total shitshow.
I went there 30 years ago. I was thinking mainly of the Chicago Principles put out by Pres Zimmer and his general dismissing of requests to disinvite speakers etc. I'm sure there are many students who are happy to cancel each other regardless.
Also, Chodush at Claremont followed-up strong to Zimmer. As did a couple others, all should be praised, they went against the current and had a positive effect.
Rob...good hit
I hate to even visit the idea upon you, but...have you ever read The Gulag Archipelago? What we are seeing here is a dress rehearsal. It begins with lies. You tolerate the lies. Then you repeat the lies. Then you lie to yourself.
Are you talking about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, or both?
He's more likely talking about "men can get pregnant" and "hands up don't shoot".
Thank you for the support miles.
Very true, Comrade! But our Great Leader Biden will lead us to safety!
Let's see, what level of question is that? Hmm...sort of like, "Mr. Cassidy, do you still beat or wife?" or maybe "Mr. Cassidy, does your mother know that you are stupid?" I am talking about the current Wokie logic that allows a far too significant group of Americans to continue to believe that trans men should be allowed to destroy womens' sports and/or that there is some genocide perpetrated on minorities from police officers.
“For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed.”
And that was their blinders. Thinking all educated people hated Trump and only stupid people liked Trump. The news really was that black and white on that view.
It’s the idea that smart people live on the coast and stupid hicks live in-land.
Even on the coasts - at least half of 'my circle' is Ivy League or Seven Sister...Smith, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Tufts, Brown, Johns Hopkins...and they voted TRUMP...yup.
Thank you. That's encouraging. Try to find the book, written by two CNN employees, called The Great Revolt. A great experiment to try to understand the Trump voter.
One thing for sure, the Democrats, The Progressives, Leftists,etc still don't 'get it'. Just read the front page of The NYTimes (I for one have cancelled it after 35 years). It's as if they are putting their fingers in their ears. Trump supporters and the issues that drove them to the polls have not gone away.
The Great Revolt - Salena Zito and Brad Todd.
Yes! Thank you.
Trump is an embarrassment and anyone who supports Trump is reviled for not being embarrassed. These are Bobos in paradise, Bourgeois Bohemians, good taste is their cultural currency.
Unfortunately, they wouldn't know good taste if it jumped up and bit 'em in the ass. That's what's so pathetic--the ultra-lame parochialism of how they view the world. They remind me of listening to the utter inanity of aristocrats, commenting on the world around them with zero understanding.
Because they are all so poorly educated (in spite of their "pedigrees"), they know nothing about anything worth knowing: they substitute snark for wit, they label any POS as art, they can't write, they have no empathy because they've never done a lick of real work, with real people. It's an entire generation where vapid horseshit is the only product. All their precious races and genders, etc all crapping in a big funnel that releases only toxic sludge.
Have a nice day!
"...ultra-lame parochialism" Love it and the rest of your comment as well. You are on to something here.
Good rant (great) , I enjoyed that.
Many thanks--sometimes they just come to me...;-)
Cathartic eh!
You know Bobos in Paradise was the name of a book by a conservative. :)
Is David Brooks a conservative? I like him, he is quite brilliant.
As he has stated many times. Yes, good writer.
I know he says he is a conservative but that’s a platitude, kinda hollow. NYT needs too feign diversity of opinion, he is fully committed to their Overton window, what Wesley Yang calls the “Vertically integrated messaging apparatus “.
"all episodes of mass hysteria will end"
I hope your optimism is justified. Major episodes of mass hysteria ended only because external factors intervened, not because they were bound to collapse.
Nazi Germany, an example of mass hysteria gripping the bulk of the German and Austrian population, as well as significant segments in France, ended only because of external forces: the Allied success in the war. Had Britain faltered in 1940, it might have reached a diplomatic agreement which left that regime in place.
Mass hysteria in China, starting with the personality cult in the 1950s did not end until the late 1970s.
Well true but look at the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism. Salem lasted about a year (witch hysteria much longer) and eventually ended because it just became too ridiculous - they accused the governor's wife of witchcraft. The same thing happened with McCarthyism. once he began accusing members of the military...that is when it all came toppling down. I have thought more than once that we might have arrived at the "it's just too ridiculous to last" moment but so far that hasn't happened.
True but even then... McCarthy tried to extend his campaign to the military and the threat that it would lead to a coup brought greater forces to defeat him. Today, the woke have taken the upper levels of the military, as one can see from the Navy recommended reading list
https://libguides.usna.edu/c.php?g=410502&p=8208901
Salem witch trials happened around the time of the English Civil War, which had significant religious components. After the Restoration Charles II tried to defuse these with greater tolerance, leading to the end of witch burning in England and its colonies.
It's hard to see these episodes of fanaticism burning out on their own, with people realizing the insanity of their behavior.
One ray of hope is the courage of some individuals, like Bari Weiss and yourself, to take great risks against such opponents to defend individual freedom and tolerance.
And it won't happen so long as so many people don't understand woke absurdity to be the inevitable endgame of identity politics. You can't fix this problem while continuing to support its root cause.
Some people think it's peaking. Let's hope Kotkin is right. http://www.newgeography.com/content/006888-peak-progressive
After Mao's death, in other words. In our case, the half-senile gerontocracy of Biden et al. has to pass from the scene. It's the constant caving-in of the gerontocrats and older Boomers that gives this movement the momentum it has. Like the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it's not a youth movement, appearances apart. It's been engineered from the top down and by the older on the younger.
Jesus, that comment on the Allied success in the WWII inevitably makes my blood boil in the same vein both Peters’ blood (presumably) was boiling about the lack of mention of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the role of Hollywood history (museum). The Allied forces arrived to pick a cherry on a cake after the generation of my selfless Soviet grandparents paid the butcher bill in the World War II fighting for two long years, (before the Allied arrival, and two long years after their arrival); pushing the Nazi back, while taking the stab in the back from their own government. In moments like this I feel that USA has fully deserved its fate by betraying the legacy of the Russian (Soviet) people who made the victory over Nazism possible.
The Allies in WW2 *** always*** refers to the Big Three: USSR, UK, US and was always mentioned that way in Churchill's 6 volume The Second World War.
Churchill himself described the Eastern Front as the "First Front", in comparison to the planned Second Front in Normandy. It is an unfortunate US-centricism that refers to the Allies as just US and UK, and to Eisenhower as "the man who defeated Hitler", one to which any serious history buff takes exception.
Adam Tooze's study of the Nazi economy showed the German Army had an average of 40,000 deaths /month on the Eastern Front and that in October 1941 his Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, had a meeting with Hitler to inform him that the war could no longer be won by military means.
It was clear by mid-1943, after the Battle of Kursk, that the Red Army would be able to win the war on its own: Germany's official policy in the East became one of "strategic retreat" and Stalin toned down his requests for an Allied landing in France, as it would allow his armies to advance further into Europe.
That said, it is worth remembering that much of the Soviet losses were caused by Stalin's military ineptitude. His refusal to abandon Kiev in Sept 1941 led to 650,000 Soviet prisoners. His insistence of an wide-ranging offensive on January 5, 1942, after the victory at the Battle of Moscow, spread Soviet forces too thin and led to its defeat. In both cases Stalin was strongly contradicted by Gen Zhukov, the top Soviet (and Allied) commander of the war.
I certainly did not intend my comment the way you interpreted it, as just US and UK, and in my home we always celebrate November 19 as a great day. "Send a messenger to collect some fur gloves", Anthony Beevor, "Stalingrad".
Thank you for your long explanation, it returned my blood pressure back to normal. ;) I have a short fuse when it comes to the matters of WWII, because most of us, the Soviets grew up in the debris of that war, with every field trip starting elementary school involving the description of the Nazi atrocities on our land. So, when I arrived to the US as a scholar in 1998 and learnt what they teach here I was... shocked. I guess, I just never recovered from neither and now enter a PTSD trajectory every time I see a capital 'W' twice.... I appreciate your thoughtful attention to my comment!
I mean, the French and British weren't late to the fight (and neither were us Canadians I might add!!)
It was very specifically the Americans who were late to the party, but they tipped the scales (and don't they know it). The Nazis had to ease up on the Eastern Front once they were fighting American reinforcements on the Western Front.
That's not true: the German Army had 3/4 of its strength on the Eastern Front from June 1941 through the end of the war, measured both in men and in armor (see Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction").
Soviet T34 (and later T34-85) tanks were considerably superior to any in the US and UK inventory as well as most German designs, for which reason the Soviets requested not to receive any US or British tanks as part of Lend-Lease. Soviet armor operations, one recovered from Stalin's purges, proved more innovative than Germany's and led to massive encirclements at Stalingrad and in Bielorrussia and Ukraine; nothing of the sort happened on the Western Front.
The real Western contribution was the destruction of Germany's airforce, mainly during Big Week in Feb 1944, and the destruction of Germany's industry during the Strategic Air Offensive.
It's sobering to remember that Germany had 700,000 soldiers fighting partisans in the Balkans, 1,000,000 soldiers in France during D-Day, and 4 million soldiers on the Eastern Front.
I heard 2/3 of men on Eastern Front, and materiel were held back because of the new American threat on the Western.
"I heard 2/3 of men on Eastern Front"
Is this some sort of negotiation?
Many popular books on the war in the East, by John Erickson, David Glantz, Richard Overy, Anthony Beevor are available. Erick Ziemcke has published a two-volume summary of the US Army study of that campaign.
An enjoyable read, for me, at least, of 6-7 of those books would definitely leave you better informed that you appear to be now.
Give some credit to General Winter
Not true at all: the Germans started losing at the Battle of Stalingrad (Nov 19, 1942 - Jan 30, 1943).
That defeat, the greatest German defeat in recorded history since Julius Ceasar, had such an effect that for one month German radio stations could only broadcast somber music by Brahms and Beethoven.
By July 1943 the German summer offensive was crushed at the Battle of Kursk, the first time this had ever happened. After that the official German policy on the Eastern Front was "strategic retreat".
American involvement up to mid-1943 was limited to North Africa, a peripheral campaign as far as the Germans were concerned, undertaken only because Hitler was concerned about his Italian ally.
Well-read folks on WW2 in the Eastern Front are aware winter was a minor concern in July 1943 at the Battle of Kursk, where the bulk of Germany's armored force was destroyed.
Despite the polls, most people I know who despise illiberalism are well educated --masters, Ph.D.s., at least college. But so do my electrician and plumber. They count, too. Part of the problem is use of words like "elite." The activist class construes it literally and clearly -- comically -- thinks itself superior. Are radical identitarians really an "aristocracy"? The endless stream of vin ordinaire commenters, anchors in name only, and one-dimensional activists? More apt appellations are Party hacks, conformists. The Big Cheese propagandists are commissars. Education has become confused or synonymous with indoctrination --the latter virtually never a sign of a superior intelligence, which resists same.
"For the mostly educated in this country it was a shock that people who would vote for Trump existed.": -- Excuse me @Sasha Stone - what makes you think the moral puritans on the left are "educated"? I have met many of them all over the country and throughout the years. They are generally uneducated or quasi-educated, with little understanding of history and absolutely no understanding of economics and barely any of the sciences. They have no knowledge of rigorous philosophy, except for the popular stuff they read in literature.
To call these people "educated" just goes to show that they are good in masquerading and pretending to be knowledgeable individuals. They are anything but. Let's not insult people here by calling the typical leftist or worse the typical woke "educated".
I'll add that, in spite of their Ivy League cargo cult, they are also virtually innumerate, and most have never taken an actual college-level hard science class of any kind
That would be because, apparently, math is now racist.
Think carefully before invoking Lebesgue's Dominated Convergence Theorem.
Great insight. I wonder if it's time for a new alternative entertainment industry centered somewhere in "flyover country" that serves the silent majority of the country that is fed up with the BS from Hollywood. I would pay for that.
There already is. The Daily Wire has a lot of content, including movies.
Hollywood produces whatever sells. Always has, always will. So, tell me, what movies do "flyover country" want to see that Hollywood refuses to produce?
I wish. I'd be rich. I'm asking because Mr. Block claims that Hollywood doesn't make films the "silent majority" in "flyover country" would enjoy. So I asked him to detail what kind of films he thinks Hollywood should make that "flyover country" would enjoy, but doesn't. I've lived in "flyover country" all my life and believe I am well served by Hollywood's offerings. But he's welcome to show me all the movies I've been missing.
It's been done. Zombies eat everyone, everywhere, and have in dozens of movies. Next idea that's been done to death?
"laugh their assess off watching the leftists offer the zombies equity."
Now this one is funny!
Same question to you, then: what movies should Hollywood produce that it doesn't?
Thank you Sasha Stone for your informed and insightful posting. I am glad to see there are some sane voices left in the industry.
You were (and are) far more a part of the problem than you realize, even today. You have not abandoned the beliefs whose consequences you complain about.
Well it's a complicated thing. I don't think pushing for inclusion back when I was doing it, around 2011, was wrong. It never made sense to me that there was such a white wall that could not be penetrated. And it didn't matter how much I wrote about it the general public was starting to notice and when Twitter came around the complaints against them got louder. I don't regret my contribution to making change. Some of that change has been a positive for the Oscars and for Hollywood. Times were changing and the Oscars had to change with them. But it went too far. Now it has gone too far. So I'm trying to do my part to bring things back. It might be too late. This movement was happening all over the country in 2013 and 2014 on college campuses and everywhere else. The Oscars were a sitting duck, like every other institution in this country, with or without my coverage.
Identity politics cannot have good results. So long as you diagnose "racism" via simple bean-counting rather than by scrutinizing methodology, you will contribute to similar problems. Wokeness is not a fluke; it's the only way identity politics can ever end.
If you think a specific black performer lost an award to an inferior white performer in a specific instance, speak against that injustice. That could be valid. But to say "there are too few black winners!" can never have good outcomes. If you don't realize that yet, then you will remain part of the problem.
Well with due respect, I'm not sure you understand fully what I think. I was telling you what I thought previously and that I do not regret that. Ultimately I am not a supporter of equity. Even in the past I advocated for films I thought were good enough but that were not getting the recognition they deserved because of baked in bias, which is obvious, especially when people win who do not deserve to win. I've been covering the Oscars for 20 years and I can give you plenty of examples of how it's a popularity contest more than it is anything else. Films win for a variety of reasons that don't necessarily mean the best film won. In general the Oscars themselves have tried to vote for movies they believed told a righteous message, like even Crash or Driving Miss Daisy. I have never advocated for someone to win because they were black. Winning is about gaining a consensus and gaining a consensus is often about falling in love with a person for a season. This has been true throughout Oscar history. What I saw were better performances go overlooked to favor the white actors again and again and again and again. You see that enough times and you begin to feel frustrated. Right now I don't feel that way, though I do think one black actress winning in 94 years of Oscar history is, um, shall we say kind of a glaring problem. But what we're talking about is different from what this piece here by Bari Weiss is about. It isn't about picking winners for the Oscars. It is about the entire industry losing its mind to a fundamentalist religion. If you think I am part of the problem then so be it. I've been on both sides of the issue and I have never exactly had a huge amount of respect for film awards. Not ever. Most of the time I've been covering them I do so knowing that the best do not win. It is a bigger picture than you make it out to be. It isn't just about what YOU think deserves to win. It is about what thousands think. Do I think they should vote based on woke doctrine? No. But do I think hardly any black actors would win if they didn't? Probably. I've written enough about this subject going on 15 years now. I don't really want to write much more here but just to say - my conscience is clean. Doesn't mean I don't want to encourage people to speak out, be honest and make good art again. I do.
Sorry, not this piece BY Bari -- I know she did not write it.
Sasha, my 2 cents is that if both extremes hate you, you're probably doing something right.
Ideally, you want the woke left to think you're a fascist, and the MAGA right to think you're a communist. That's the best indicator that you're sticking with "Common Sense", as Bari puts it.
Liberal agrees with far righter. And the sky turned to fire . . .
Inclusion is always better. But since most institutions do not change until forced--the military wasn't integrated until Harry Truman ordered it so--how do you propose to get them to be inclusive voluntarily?
I know the difference. Liberals want to use government *appropriately.* That can be zero, minimal, maximal, or something in between, depending on the situation and need.
Minimize or eliminate it in some cases--we have 50 state departments of education, no reason to have a federal one. Maximize it in others--ensure taxes are collected from everyone who owes them, ensure criminals are prosecuted, ensure corporations do not break our laws in their natural pursuit of profits--i.e., Enron, Wells Fargo, and the S&L industry.
Does that mean imposing behavior? Sure, when the situation warrants. Speed limits impose behavior. Banning toxic waste from being dumped in our rivers imposes behavior. Arresting rioters and looters on the left and the right imposes behavior. There is nothing wrong with imposing behavior per se.
Liberals care only that the power of government and business do not abuse innocent people, who should be left alone as much as possible. At least this liberal cares about that.
Why is Sasha stones mea culpa not sufficient for you: sincere question?
Because it's not an abandonment of the toxic principles that caused the problem; it's only a complaint about their consequences. The post I replied to clearly includes a defense of identity politics, provided that they don't manifest in ways the writer finds harmful.
"Real communism hasn't been tried" isn't just a pithy right-wing retort - it's a description of the fact that the holders of toxic ideologies forever describe the inevitable consequences of their ideologies as a perversion of their ideologies rather than their natural result.
There's a distinction between principles and ideologies. Principles can conflict, and tradeoffs need to be managed. Ideologies are primarily driven by denialism about tradeoffs.
There's plenty of room in between "real communism hasn't been tried" and "the soviet union was bad so I guess the poor can all go fuck themselves"
Your definitions of "principles" and "ideologies" are not common, nor have you actually defined a defensible distinction.
Your second paragraph is an absurdity; the notion that there is a relationship between caring about the poor and supporting communism is a communist lie.
A principle would be "income inequality shouldn't be allowed to spiral out of control". An ideology would be "when it comes to fighting inequality, the ends always justify the means"
You complaining that Sasha hasn't abandoned all her principles says more about you than her.
Ok you make your point well - bad ideology must be renounced not just bad outcome. That said I have a lot of sympathy for Sasha Stone’s new found realization that the well intended and laudable quest for inclusion and diversity has gone insane and begun cannibalizing itself. Baby steps I suppose.
MAGA-conservatives love to pile on the "I told you so's" whenever anyone to the left of Grover Norquist says wokeness is a problem.
Do you understand that even a nuclear-strength critique of Progressive Wokeism and its endless disasters does not make one a conservative? It's just an affirmation of one's socio-political sanity.
I get that, being a centrist liberal who shit-talks wokeness constantly. Seriously devout conservatives, like JDFree, think people like me and Sasha are half-assing it by not going full-blown right wing.
Your subsequent comment about communism and the poor suggests that you are the one whose radicalism is the problem here.
"far more a part of the problem than you realize, even today"
Must be nice to feel so profoundly insightful and knowledgeable. And they say wisdom comes from self reflection, constant questioning and humility.
"For the mostly educated" who are actually mostly braindead and clueless, Hillary Clinton "deserved" to take Bernie's nomination and "deserved" to be the first woman president. Think about that for a moment. I still am amazed that "educated" people can't see that Trump was a symptom, not a root case.
when race and sexuality trump talent bend over we are fucked
Woke is just the latest Marxist incarnation. It, just as all things created using Marx's ideas will destroy everything it touches just as Stalin killed both opponents and supporters alike once they had outlived their usefulness or stepped one step outside his orthodoxy. Even Yezhov was killed once he knew to much. This is what will happen to "Wokewood".
I've always liked your comments Sasha and find myself often agreeing. How exciting to learn about your background and to find your Substack.
Thanks for this comment. It got me interested in your substack.
I, like so many others, am disillusioned, disheartened, disappointed.....disgusted by what seems to have happened to the modern Left.
This time it may very well not "end" in anything pretty and only recognizable in a science fiction dystopia.
and don't forget the other intersection of gender - where biological sex becomes meaningless and woman is just a feeling.
“Rochée Jeffrey, a black writer on “Grownish,” “Santa Inc.,” and “Woke,” said: “I don’t care if white people aren’t comfortable because black people are uncomfortable all the fucking time.”
———————————————
This is my favorite new phenomenon. It is a combination of pathological narcissism and racism. Maybe call it racissism?
😂😂😂
As a narcissist, this guy thinks that since he feels uncomfortable, everyone else who is black must feel uncomfortable……because he also believes that all black people are the same. Awesome. Good stuff.
👍👍👍
(It’s also possible that he is lying about feeling uncomfortable and he is just using that as a weapon to dominate people by exploiting their empathetic response. I think that’s called sociopathy.)
What’s being revealed in this moment is how racist ‘blacks’ themselves are or can be….
We gotta stop letting division dominate our calculations.
A few years ago, Starbucks closed all their stores for a day or racial-resentment training after a manager in Philadelphia had attempted to enforce company policy. One of the training videos showed a black guy saying he was afraid to leave his house and then showed a white guy saying he just leaves the house and does his thing whenever he feels like it. Thank you, Howard Schultz, for your contribution to our national healing.
You hit the nail on the head: a primary feature of narcissism is that other people are responsible for the way you feel. I've had to ingest white Millennial faculty claim that their whiteness causes harm. Well, blackness causes harm too. It could even cause MORE harm. But they turn it on white behavior, label that wrong, and insist white people do what -- not act "white"? Well then should we act "black"? What would that do? The whole thing is so ridiculously stupid it's a wonder anyone is falling for it.
“I’ve had to ingest white millennial faculty claim that their whiteness causes harm.”
—————————————
This is also a manifestation of narcissism. When you believe you are the center of the universe you perceive that you have an outsized impact on everything around you.
Sounds like “reparations” and revenge, and is totally racist.
Would you include in the payers a white whose parents immigrated to the US in 1970? This reparations game is a huge scam and lacks any rational basis. You rail against the woke insanity but embrace one of its core values of victimization. Just for giggles, take a look at the 100 richest people in America. Almost no inherited wealth and few, if any, whose wealth originated from slavery. This is just a giant con game and smart people such as you shouldn't be complicit in it.
Biden’s ancestors owned slaves so we start by zeroing out his family’s bank accounts.
Kamala Harris’ Jamaican family owned slaves as well yet she keeps doing the ‘BIPOC dance’. The entire movement is immoral.
Pal Joey? The working guy from Scranton? Tamer of Corn Pop? Savior of Mandela? The guy who said "if you don't vote for me yo ain't black?" That Joey? A descendant of slavers?
Say it ain't so.
Listen, Bal. I’m gonna shut down your virus!!
“Almost no one inherited wealth…”. Maybe, if emphasis is on word “inherited”, but most got a big leg up with high six or seven figure loans from parents or friends for their first ventures. Bootstraps are bullshit.
Jeff Bezos was born to a teen mom in New Mexico. Only 16% of millionaires inherited more than $100,000 and 3% inherited over $1 million.
You must just not know any rich people. That’s fine. I know a lot of them. Only a small fraction are spoiled inheritance brats and most of them end up like Hunter Biden because it’s the same as a government welfare program.
You’ve been manipulated by propaganda. Even if your assertion was based in fact, the only way to solve it would be totalitarianism.
A million dollars isn't what it used to be. Plenty of millionaires are self-made, but the majority of billionaires are not.
Again, I didn’t say anything about inheriting anything. I know many rich people, am a graduate of an Ivy League college and law school myself. Most of my fellow students who weren’t on scholarship weren’t taking out loans and their parents had often paid for years of boarding schools and travel and sports. Yet they didn’t see themselves as privileged.
Most of these entrepreneurs get large loans from friends and family. Most startups aren’t just one dude writing code in his garage before cashing in.
I am no millionaire but my life is absolute proof that bootstraps aren’t just real, they’re critical.
Everything is a matter of perspective.
NO. I grew up in a van down by the river on the outskirts of Appalachia. I'm done with 'uber-compassionate' Liberals "helping" me. 90% of it has always been about them getting their dopamine hits, while making a comfortable living off of their 'oh so massive' compassion.
What makes people who they are in life is how they play the hand that they are dealt. But there is a tribe of people that get So Freaking High off of taking that option away from other people.
There is a reason people compete for the title of "most empathetic". It makes them feel good. It's an addiction. On more levels than one.
What kinds of solutions could have evolved from the ground up if the anointed hadn't been forcing their own self-serving panaceas down our throats?
It's one thing to lend a hand, (10%) and entirely another to play God (90%). And don't think for a second that people that have zero experience with money are going to have have a clue how to use your reparations. (I'd go long on doordash, fentanyl, purple drink and Nike.)
Guess the uber-compassionate will have to build up another huge Leviathan like apparatus to monitor and supervise the reparations process, with an 80% set aside for "administrative processes". Yum yum, more dopamine hits and cushy jobs for the "anointed"! More marshmallows, peanuts and circuses for the "unfortunate" among us. But don't it feel good?
https://youtu.be/iEIApUNVBKg
Good choice. But I was thinking this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2VIEY9-A8
Great to see Chris Farley roll again--and David Spade trying to keep a straight face!
lol. Must. Observe. Priorities. On. Comment. Board.
You’re speaking truth.
Note to Rochée: fuck you. They're not "uncomfortable"--they're unemployed, you dumb asshole.
Great comment. Thanks.
Sounds like he’s talking about my ex.
💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻
I like much of what Hoffer had to say, but that quote is a little too cut and dried. I'm not much for such unequivocal sweeping generalizations.
See Also famous Black leaders: Du Bois (who was terrible & BLM celebrates) vs. Booker T. Washington (who was awesome & BLM vilifies)
Washington believed Blacks should work hard, study hard, be good citizens, have economic independence and create wealth for themselves, while Du Bois created NAACP and believed in fighting the system for rights via laws & mandates. Du Bois was a Pan-Africanist & Socialist.
Some of us, being all too familiar with American history, hold the opinion that both approaches were necessary, and important. I mean, as if the State oppression of de jure segregation was ever going to be overthrown without "fighting the system via laws and mandates." Much of the oppression that W.E.B. Du Bois fought took the form of "laws and mandates" (particularly in various State law codes); none of it was going to be overturned without challenges in the arena of the law courts. A battle much more arduous than it should have been.
It's worth noting that Ibram X. Kendi doesn't think much of either Du Bois or Booker Washington. As Kendi editorializies in his book Stamped From The Beginning, which is part (mostly accurate) history and part (terribly flawed) polemic, they're both too "assimilationist" to meet his imperious presentist/essentialist standards.
The big ad agencies on both coasts are contributing to this wokism too. They’re creating ads featuring every couple as biracial or gay or minority as if the whole country is representative of that. But these ad agencies are run by leftist white guys who live in Tribeca and make millions of bucks to misrepresent America’s demographics to fulfill a quota. It’s funny actually.
Yup - seems like everyone in commercials is black today…and fashion photography is mostly black too - doesn’t reflect the country and lots of people note this. A friend’s daughter just signed with a modeling agency - in South Korea! because she couldn’t get work in the USA. #NotMyCountry
While I don't care about inter-racial marriage but watching these ads one would think it was the majority of American marriages. The white guys with obvious biracial kids populating these commercials is so out of step with reality. Wondering if that is the case in China, Japan or other nations or are we prone to depicting the world as we hope it should be or as it is?
In any event this trend is provokes laughter and derision whenever it comes up in conversation. Even POC can see the pandering as insulting. BTW many black African American women are not amused when seeing white woman hooked up with black men. Might be a supply and demand thing. Might even be a feeling of being marginalized by this idea of the "white Queen" being idealized as the preferred partner by Black men.
And in the few commercials that have white people, every white male is stupid (the white dude with the Prius and the fish bowl on the roof) or a fool (ATT with the white guy whose kids get lollipops asking the ATT woman for a lollipop). There is another ATT ad with a dippy soy white guy with a dopey blonde spouse/GF, so the white, blonde is also on the hit list. We just laugh...
Well we all could go on for hours with the silly and stupid depictions of white guys. Now we might know how some Black folks felt about the Amos and Andy show and other negative stereotypes. Love the one where the guy with the cracked windshield says nothing while his wife takes charge and pays while he stands by mute. Sure that happens all the time in the average American household.
More often than not, the white women who are with black men are the ones who got rejected by white men.
OkCupid did a study on racial dating preferences. Most people prefer to date within their race. When dating outside of race, white men & white women were most preferred by everyone. White women overwhelmingly want white men. White men want white women. And Asian women CHASE HARD after white men. The black men seemed to prefer white women but white women did not prefer black men. Meaning, a white women with a black man is more likely not with her preferred choice of partner. A white man with an Asian woman, same thing.
There are some Asian women who reject Asian men & only hunt hard after white men. Not sure why. IRL, the white guys who I've seen end up with Asian women are typically the nerdier type, shy type, the guys who are not the ones out there making the first move. Thus, what ends up happening is these Asian women who have white man fetish make the first move & hit on the guy, so he ends up with her.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/okcupid-race_n_5811840
Not funny. Infuriating. And I think if many of these companies tried to survive on the revenue from blacks or gays alone, they would wither. It’s time to start fighting back with our dollars.
To me it’s funny because they think we’re stupid enough to not know what ‘s going on.
Well, we don't do much about it so maybe we are. After all, what would a rational majority of a nation do if medical care were withheld from them solely on the basis of race? Nations have descended into homicidal near genocide based on far less, or just perceived, slights in the last few decades - witness Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
"After all, what would a rational majority of a nation do if medical care were withheld from them solely on the basis of race?"
Unfortunately, I read recently that the wokesters are considering doing exactly that -- using race as one of the criteria for deciding on whether or not you will get medical treatment for covid.
I think Bruce's point is that there isn't NEARLY as much backlash as there should be to the federal gov't just casually rolling out neo-segregation.
More likely, afraid to speak up.
What irritates me to no end are all the men wearing expensive women's clothes in the ads that appear in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. I think that's a major turn off for many women. What biological woman wants to look like a drag queen? Speaking of Vanity Fair, it's gone down the drain since the new editor in chief, a diversity hire, was put in place. Circulation must be down sharply. The current subscription price is only $8 per year with a free tote bag. I'm sure it's on its last legs.
Thanks, I otherwise never would have know that. I'm not kidding--it's details like that which help to flesh out a problem.
For a very muscular explanation of woke, check out Wesley Yang substack
Yup, I’ve had this shoved down my throat for some time now 🤮🤮.
Re “the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.”
Sad but true. I avoid newer movies and television. I know that it is fiction, but it's exhausting. None of these people are like me or interact like me and all of my friends. And for some reason, proper English has disappeared (pity Sidney Poitier now).I find that even science fiction movies inhabit this universe of "woke". I can only buy so much fantasy at once.
On television I find it hard to believe that almost every couple is either bi-racial or gay or "fluid" or unhappy. The percentages don't work for me.
And the remakes where they pop a woman in to replace a male. Sheer pandering. Write your own story and I won't care if the person has zebra stripes.
And the ads are all black now. Do they seriously think the white viewers relate best to mixed race or all-black couples (note that mixed race is always black husband and white wife, never the other way around because...reasons...)? I think of myself as "colorblind" but I have to admit that when I see these woke, pandering types of ads, I feel a momentary rush of irritation at the politics of it, and then resolve never to buy that product. Multiply by 50 million.
As for sci-fi and fantasy... don't get me started. They have taken every Golden Age comic book and turned them into woke political messaging vehicles.
These ads are being shoved down our throats.
It’s ridiculous.
I stopped buying products if the demography in the add does not reflect the reality.
Precisely. Gillette got in big trouble a couple of years ago with their stupid "toxic masculinity" commercial and suffered multi-billion dollar losses. By the way, what's the significance of the little purple design next to your icon?
I think the icon indicates that I am a paid subscriber and contributed over certain amount but that’s just a guess :))
So what is it?
Don't watch DC Legends of Tomorrow. You'll be throwing things at the television.
Funny thing was, in the beginning, the show had two gay actors and it wasn't even part of the storyline....they were just PEOPLE!
yeah. black people are only 12% (1/8) of the US population so having them in 100% of ads is NOT representative. If 1/8 was black, that would be correct representation.
and LGBTQ+ is like 5-8% of US population, so 1/12 would be LGBT correctly represented.
We watched Casablanca, To Sir With Love and Young Frankenstein this past month. We will not watch the garbage they put out now...
An alien, or Rip can Winkle type, who watched current American TV / movies for a couple days to learn about our culture would be left with a completely fantasy-land idea of what the US is like today in terms of culture, demographics, behavior, etc.
Complete with a laugh track.
I have friends living in Germany, and what they know about our politics is a reflection of USA leftist views repeated in their mass media. And they are watching our TV shows, I am having fun asking what is proportion of blacks here, 25-30% is common answer. I wonder how many fellow Americans think the same!
Ha, before I first came to the US some 20 years ago I thought it was even more based on watching US movies where the main characters where typically 1white 1black.
And now...an Asian and an extraordinarily fit woman
yup. black people are only 12% (1/8) of the US population so having them in 100% of shows is NOT representative. If 1/8 was black, that would be correct representation.
and LGBTQ+ is like 5-8% of US population, so 1/12 would be LGBT correctly represented.
Absolutely spot on. I stopped watching new movies a few years ago because they were so dreadfully woke, I couldn't stand it. I enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Man in the High Castle. But the fourth was so laughably woke, I turned it off after the first twenty minutes. I'm sure they fired all the old writers and hired a bunch of the new faces whose only qualification was their demographic data. The casting of TV commercials today is so heavy handed and bizarre, it's like they used a bingo machine to put couples together. If I want to see a movie on amazon prime, I've got to go back at least three decades for find something watchable.
That quote was the highlight of the entire piece. I can't watch television anymore and I didn't really know why until I read that quote.
Very interesting and a lot shadenfreudey. Personally I could not care less about the hypocritical and whiny entertainment industry. Right now I’m watching Boston Legal and even 15 years ago Hollywood was woke. Ah well.
Hey, has anyone noticed white people aren’t in commercials anymore? Only black people climb mountains and go to the beach and do all the things white people used to do but don’t anymore. And all couples are either totally black or mixed race. And if a white person is in a commercial they’re stupid while the professionals are black. Yeah that’s believable. Sad what the woke are doing. Meanwhile the inner city schools are dreadful and POC are still being used and discarded by the left.
Oh and White Lotus was stupid and I didn’t even bother to finish the last couple of episodes.
White males in media today are primarily: gay, buffoons, married to a black woman, or villains. It's apparent and nonsensical.
‘Just came back from skiing and didn’t see a black person the entire week - but the commercials on the Telly show us how insane the country has gotten
CC you obviously weren’t looking in the right places.
Restaurants, the airports- not a one from Jackson Hole to Utah
You forgot your BIPOC sunglasses. I mean would the media lie to us?
I live in the JH area. There are a few black people around, but I'd guesstimate no more than 1% of the population, if that. Also, very few Asians.
I did see Asians about in restaurants and at the airport. One sitting in front of me on the plane wore a t-shirt that read, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ on the front and ‘Lions not sheep’ on the back!!!
We moved here following 25+ years in Silicon Valley, which is somewhere around 50% Asian, way more like %75 in cities like Cupertino and Fremont. Let me let you in on a little secret: They are not woke. They are pursuing the dream and they are succeeding. One of my law partners is first generation from Taiwan. He likes to hunt animals and has a CC permit (in California - not easy to do). Proggies have a hard time dealing with Asians because they have "brown" skin but do not fit the skin color is everything narrative. And, I have bad news for proggies: Asians are 60% of the world's population.
Yes. It's gotten very bad, especially recently. The only white people who appear in commercials are married to black people.
Indeed. I've tuned out. Two examples: I now DVR my Kansas City Chief's football games and watch them skipping the commercials because I can't stand the wokery on the commercials, and only-white-men-can-be-clowns casting. Secondly, I've discovered Korean and Taiwanese romantic comedies and period pieces on Netflix -- actually very witty writing, well-enough acting, and good-enough production values, and (big thumbs up) absolutely no explicit sex. It's like stepping back into 1960's television like "I Dream of Gennie" or "The Lucy Show." Granted the casts are all of one race, but that's not the point -- all you see is the story.
French and Spanish series are good places to look, as well
The entertainment industry hasn't been very entertaining for quite some time; it has finally accelerated to the point that it's not entertaining at all.
My nephew (semi reliable child) told me that the new 007 will be a black female. I concede the designation is transferable. I also asked him if she would be well dressed, drinking martinis, smoking and making passes at young women. He accused me, yes me, of being sarcastic.
hard to feel sympathy for the people who blacklisted conservatives for years in Hollywood. Let them meet the world they created.
I used to love movies, but the last ten years or so, I've stopped paying attention to what's coming out. When you hire based on anything besides skill (writing skill, reading-the-room skill, skill at actually knowing how people live), and you hire people who only got there because of a set of grievances (grievances they have every motivation to keep going, even if they have been addressed and are being addressed), you end up with either (1) preachy propagandistic films or (2) regurgitated reboots (or they might as well be reboots, because you can play the "what classic movie did they steal that from" game while you're watching). No one seems to know how to tell a story anymore, because the story is not really the point.
Now I read. Books are not free of the above, but they're freer.
Yep. I pay no attention to Hollywood or movies anymore. Hollywood needs a
“Substack”
I find the same thing in some books. So what I do is find the authors contact info and brace them on it usually with something like why would you dismiss half your audience so you can virtue signal and feel good. Honestly, it’s like they’ve never thought about that before. And what do you know, some have even written back and acknowledged what they did was stupid.
You know who doesn’t give you the time of day when called on their bias? Wall St Journal reporters, the same 280 ones that sent the letter to the Ed board shrieking about their bias.
I suspect today's authors have to be extremely careful to have their books pass the purity test, or they will be smeared and canceled.
Yes, I have read about that. Apparently you may only write about people who match your own "lived" experience.
I never thought about writing to the authors. I just don't buy more of their books. There are so many good authors to pick from, ones that really just want to tell a good story or reveal something *real* about the human condition. And, yes, I've noticed there are self-labelled conservatives that blend in quite well with the virtue-signalers.
Oh I don’t buy the books. I use the library. That’s the only service I get for paying my property taxes.
kids' schools? or are they in private school
Me too; trying to ween myself off Fox news clips and conservative commentators on Youtube and spend more time reading. I have like 10 books in my Alibris shopping cart right now, waiting for the next coupon to hit :)
That story could be about academia as well. The path out of embedded woke-ism is hard to see in industries where 90+ percent of the workers and management are from the left and far left. This reads like a science fiction description of some sort of soft Stalinism.
It seems to have infected office worker culture everywhere too. Even big construction companies have monthly DEI messaging from HR. I'll be damned if I ever leave the field and end up dealing with that crap in the office full time.
Having moved to the office, the HR fluff is easier to tune out than you think. That said, if employees start getting conscripted into mandatory diversity/sensitivity training sessions, then it's time to update the ol' resume.
Not so soft Stalinism when professors of medicine have to issue public apologies for using the term "pregnant women". The woke term is "birthing people", a step too far even for Stalin's favorite geneticist Trofym Lysenko.
I was reminded of Lysenko when reading the early reporting on our novel virus, from our "scientists." https://scareballoon.substack.com/p/plague-journal-may-2020-yellow-journalism
"Archie Bunker—the main character—“is basically a Trump voter,” a producer explained."
Bullshit. I can say with a high level of certainty that the vast majority of Trump voters care more about your rights than you care about theirs, and probably more than you care about your own.
Just because you created the "Trump voter caricature" does not mean you got it right. So get over yourself. When you live in a fake world for so long, you begin to think it is real.
I am not the least bit disappointed to see Hollywood, the great land of pretend and pretension, in such a state. As Miles stated in the earlier response, we are past the point of hypotheticals. And your industry will likely die a slow death as a result.
Amazing at this point they have no understanding or interest in what is driving the MAGA movement.
One thing Hollywood makes clear time and time again is that, every time they create an alleged conservative character, they make it crystal clear that they have absolutely NO CLUE whatsoever who or what a conservative really is, really thinks, really believes.
I'm pretty sure "you" is those dumb Hollywood creators and not the writers of this blog (Peter and Peter). Just making sure :)
Yes there is a weird kind of ignorant stereotype among the left which manifests as twisted cartoons, descriptions, phony anecdotes, etc., all attempting to paint conservatives as evil people.
Strangely, many of the left are flocking to Florida to enjoy the open, mandate-free environment and get away from the high crime and dysfunctional social conditions of their own miserable blue cities and states. Hopefully they will just spend some money then leave, and not stay to f*** up their clean new place as they did the old one.
A plague of locusts.
Correct. But I wouldn't call them dumb as much as willfully ignorant.
I'm also trying to figure out where the Yellowstone/1883 emergence fits in this. Both series seem to be harkening back to the "old school" of hard work, sacrifice, and self-reliance (granted, Yellowstone takes that to an extreme) and both series seem to be resonating extremely well. While I wouldn't call either one "anti-woke", they are both, at best, ambivalent to "wokeness". Has the dearth of such messages over the last 10 years created a thirst for them now?
Taylor Sheridan is the producer of Yellowstone. He just recently purchased the 6666 Ranch in Texas. He is telling authentic stories that interest many people who have not been previously exposed to this life style. He has done a great job of integrating diversity & inclusion in the show (the bunk house on Dutton Ranch has 3 women and 1 man of color - in addition to the dreaded white man). There are also Native Americans represented well. BUT - he is accomplishing this by being authentic in the stories, not shoving it down people’s throats.
I'm guessing the 6666 ranch will replace Hollywood as the major movie production location in the US in the next 10 years. It is HUGE. I think the line used by John Dutton in one of the episodes from early in season 4 (?) about their ranch needing to generate income from sources other than cattle was as much, or more, about the 6666 ranch.
And you are right about the authenticity angle - the characters are so believable (Teeter is great, as are Mo and Rainwater). I'm not sure how he does it, but Sheridan certainly captures that lifestyle very well. His work on 1883 is amazing.
My wife and I just started breed reining quarterhorses, and the market for them has really heated up in the last year. Rumor has it Sheridan is driving the market right now. I'm sure it will come down in the next few years, but for now it's way up there. (We got into the business before the market went up so don't have unrealistic expectations!)
Best of luck with your horse breeding enterprise.
I’ve got 1883 on my to watch list.
Saw the first episode and it was great.
Thanks, I'll check those out.
Nazi Pelosi bought a seaside (global warming, anyone?!) mansion, so she plans to stay and f*** up the place.
Bragg was elected, and not picked by Adams. But Adams just lost any confidence that I had in him when he justified giving his brother a $240K job in NYPD because "I need special protection from white supremacists".
I'm going to miss loathing Bill DeBlasio. Everyone needs a hobby.
Last time I checked, anyone born in the US is "indigenous" to the North America. BIPOC is just a racist dog whistle of exclusion.
Funny aside: The woke have invaded the UK as well, but there the ‘indigenous people’ are white. Interestingly, UK blacks in entertainment seem better spoken and better integrated into the culture than US blacks to its culture. The (UK) Graham Norton show remains a wonderful respite of good humor amongst the plethora of types in entertainment.
Graham Norton isn't an indigenous UK person. He's an invader/immigrant from Ireland. :-)
It took a while but the Irish are now 'passing' for white : )
And there are indications that Latinos might be taking the same route : )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9WDfg2idk
Mighty white of you to say so. :-) There is a phrase to make the woke blood boil.
In the UK the divides are class and regional. For a long time working class or regional accents or words were never/rarely heard on the national TV or radio stations. That has gradually changed in the last 30 years. Oddly enough that didn't seem to apply to Irish accents. Since the 60s there have always been a few Irish entertainers/broadcasters on the BBC, most famously Terry Wogan.
I expect that Latinos will. Not that there is really any such thing. I've always thought it odd that a Spanish person who goes direct to the US is white, but if they go through Mexico they are a POC.
Fun clip. My surname 'namesake' grandfather (great x 5) arrived to the US in 1827 and did quite well for himself, starting what became quite a large quarry and memorial stone business in New England. No matter, it would take almost a hundred years, until Kennedy became President for the Irish to get some respect. But then as a Bostonian, I went on to marry a Jew whom would be the reason, at least someone told me (in the early-1980'S) that I'd never be invited to 'polite society', meaning Brahmin Society WASP society. It's a dog-eat-dog world, no? : )
It certainly is that.
Are you going to do anything for the 200th anniversary of his arrival? I wonder how many descendants he has.
I think the protestant Irish got integrated/respected quicker. I only know bits of it, but it is interesting how the Irish gradually moved up the ladder from the bottom rung of society.
Oh my lord that was funny lol.
That was something that I noticed about ten years ago when I got cable ( beyond what was required in New York for reception)
The black and Asian people seemed to just fit into the stories. Must be the accents.
Not sure why they seem to integrate into the culture better. Could it be that British culture is much more distinct than America’s polyglot culture!? I thought it was hilarious when about a year ago some British wokesters attacked ‘gardening’ as ‘too white’ - of course, that went nowhere being one of the UK’s favorite pastimes. The woke will try to destroy everything they don’t want to work for or can’t have seems like!?
The UK has its own polyglot culture. The national dish is curry and the national (non-alcoholic) drink is tea. Both came to the UK from India. The culture in the north is very different to the south, southerners can't even understand a Scottish accent. There are millions of immigrants, there has been since the 1850s. It is as much a melting-pot as the US. One difference is that every immigrant group is tiny compared to the total population, so unless there is a constant supply of new people the immigrant group melts away. The black population is mostly from the Caribbean and came into the UK in the 1960s.
1. You can drag a horse to water, but you can't make him watch your shitty product.
2. You can't teach talent, but you can delude almost everyone into believing they have it.
Sooner or later, the industry is going to realize that producing vast amounts of mediocre, derivative, pandering, forced exposition is unsustainable if nobody watches.
We are all lovin’ Yellowstone - millions of us - written by a white dude!!
There is no way out of this in the immediate future. Teachers are the big problem. Nobody’s more woke than teachers. What do you think your children are being taught. If you want an example of this thinking go downstairs and talk to your daughter: your children. We have raised a generation of McCarthite idiots, incapable of free thought, programed to be on the right side of history and conditioned to ignore the obvious illogic and hypocrisy. I don’t see any way out of this but at least it’s going to destroy Hollywood.
My daughter and son in law took my grandkids to an Asian country for the entirety of their K-12 educations specifically because they don’t want their kids infected by the racial, sexual, anti-knowledge sect running amok in the US.
An extreme example perhaps but I can’t say they were wrong.
I own a large company, in my considerable experience foreign born employees (young adults) are better than Canadian born employees. The Canadian born are victims, they dissolve into a puddle at the first sign of adversity.
Ever seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0KjdDJr1c
I'm a millennial Canadian and I laughed a lot harder than I should have
I’ll check it out very funny thank you
You are correct. I spent a year listening to my nephew's on line school in my apartment and discovered what a truly evil person I was and what savage things I was complicit in. They still are the donuts.
Lots of people are commenting on that phenomenon, specifically, ease dropping on their children’s lessons and being shocked at the nonsense they are being taught. Teachers are very strange people they never leave school I think this leads to a certain tunnel vision. Those who can do those who can’t teach, they are not of us.
Scary. If they are being taught this kind of garbage, its time to pull them out of that school.
I consider myself an old-school liberal and I loathe the woke. Therefore, I no longer watch current American films because I refuse to be preached at by snotty, PRIVILEGED millennials of any race or ethnicity. Both the far left and far right are fomenting division and making this country is a cesspool of racial animosity.
I know who the woke are. Who are the far right that are dividing this country, specifically? This is not a both sides do it. One side is massive and extremely well funded and ingrained in all major institutions, academies, and media and the other side, this far right side is what exactly? A handful of pissed off people living in rural America, working class stiffs? With little agency or voice. This “far right” mob where is it and who leads it? Seems to me it is a straw man used to distract.
I agree that the majority of academics and media are woke. However, I will take one example, Tucker Carlson's promotion of "the great replacement theory," a clear dogwhistle to anti-immigrant sentiments. If you cannot see that this is as biased as the woke, then you are only focused on one side of the equation.
You make my case for me. One voice in the media, and on Fox, does not come anywhere near the firepower on the “dominant narrative” side. There is no equivalent “right” side. Singling out a lone voice or two is not equivalence. There is no power institution willing or able to stand up to the left. It is just us “non-narratives”. And that is if we have the courage to speak out and stop supporting the lies. Substack, Rumble, etc. I also think that Tucker pointing out the massive effort to flood the country with illegals is a good thing. Otherwise you would not even know what was happening on the border. Citizenship is good as are borders. But we need to protect both. This country does have a racism problem and it is coming from the left, blatantly.
Barron - we are preached at by SJWs that there is no such thing a racism without "power". Well, since they have the power ...
So where are the lawsuits enforce federal laws against racism? Where is congress standing up to the new racist? The left would already have judicial decisions in their favor against anything they perceive as bad. Where are the lawyers for liberty and freedom, for existing laws? It’s pretty pathetic. No actions.
Any majority European ("white") nation must have demographic changes via immigration to end that status. Canada, USA, EU, Australia, NZ. Russia and some former Soviet states seem alone in avoiding this. Maybe Argentina too.
Any majority non-white nation is fine and there is no call for increased diversity to improve their culture. The rest of the world.
Is that what "great replacement theory" means? Because it doesn't seem so much like a theory as current events.
Dog whistles are only heard by dogs. Are you a dog?
I have tried to be very respectful. Why do you feel the need to be personally insulting?
Sorry Adrienne, I'm tired of the phrase "dog whistle." Yes, everyone is biased out there. They preach to their own believers. Nothing new.
I see it on both sides and it horrifies me.
See what specifically? A few individuals vs corporations and universities, foundations, media, big tech? It’s we the people against the big money now. There is no “far right” institutions of power that exist in this country. Hell even the military is woke. So who are you talking about? Tucker? One guy?
Heaven forbid the ‘right’ have an outlet ! Poor, arrogant Obama even railed against Fox. The American Left is nauseatingly intolerant.
There are more leftists as a guest on any fox show than on MessNBCNBCCNNABCNPR combined.
No it’s the ‘center-left’ and the far-right, but I get your point.
Amy Klobuchar and Richard Spencer have the same ideology.
Amy Spencer? Richard Klobuchar?
OT - but whenever I hear "Klobuchar" I think "Frau Blucher"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bps5hJ5DQDw
My brother is an Emmy award winning TV a& film editor. Middle aged white guy who has been out of a job for a few years now. I remember when he lived in Hermosa Beach. We are from New Orleans so of course all of the white people in his industry assumed he came from a racist place down south. (Nothing further from the truth in the New Orleans I grew up in) Anyway they used to ask him, wasn’t he happy to be out of the racist south? He would respond with the fact that black & white people actually lived together in NOLA. We mixed in everywhere. We were friends co-workers, went to the same schools, bars, stood next to each other at parades, etc. He said The only black person he ever saw in Hermosa Beach was Shaquille O’Neal playing volleyball. Everywhere he worked in Hollywood was staffed by mostly white people for 25 years. I tend to doubt that was by design but they’ve always been so hypocritical. So now they are overreacting to their own perceived sins.
and Hermosa beach schools were the first to hire a "diversity "manager for $$$.
Not surprising
Yep...out "woke" em and they'll never come for you.
Truth
Hollywood trying to force woke shows down their customer's throats reminds me of the plant based "meat" business. I note that Beyond Meat's stock price has declined from about 196 post IPO (in mid 2019) to about 67 today. No amount of breathless puff pieces in the press are going to get people to pay extra for meat flavored margarine.
I think the bigger frustration is that Hollywood likes to bait-and-switch wokeness into IP that already has a big/popular following, where if the original brand was that nauseatingly woke it would never have become popular in the first place. I suppose an analogy would be McDonalds sneaking Beyond Meat into the Big Mac and hoping nobody complains.
Think major franchises like the MCU and Star Wars, and any book Netflix adapts into a show like Altered Carbon, The Witcher, etc. [edit: almost forgot ghostbusters & charlie's angels]
A British commentator once wrote this about the same trend at the BBC, after they butchered a Watership Down remake into a story about trans-feminist communism:
"Still, it seems to me even more egregious when the BBC trawls through the annals of popular historical fiction, of novels from more than 30 years ago, and ramrods into them its bien pensant obsessions. I would have been much less offended if the BBC had commissioned a writer to confect a story about a group of incredibly woke SJW rabbits, led consensually by a female called perhaps ‘Roz’, who not only liberate a fascistic warren but also open up their own warren to thousands of Iranian rabbit refugees who turn out to be kindly and agreeable and work together with the host population to combat global warming and eradicate poverty.
Nobody would watch such arrant crap, of course, but it would at least be true to itself. But this isn’t done for precisely the reason to which I alluded: nobody would watch it. Instead, the BBC piggybacks on the enormous success and popularity of novels such as Watership Down and warps them until they are unrecognisable."
From https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/save-the-rabbits-from-the-predatory-bbc
I like the McDonalds analogy. Especially since the fake meat is secretly more harmful to your health than the real meat.
Great illustration--thanks for bringing that up!
We saw an ad last night for "plant based chorizo". My son commented casually "that it is not chorizo".
I tried it. It sucked.
beyond meat? I got a free promotional Impossible Whopper about a year ago and it was okay, certainly not as good as real beef. The thing is, apparently they make it with "heme", a molecule found in red blood cells, that they have cultured in a lab using an engineered yeast, thus lending it a rather realistic flavor (not sure if that applies to all the types of artificial meats out there). To my mind, it's ridiculous; either eat the real thing, or eat pure vegetarian (plus maybe ovo-lacto). These genetically engineered artificial meats are not natural at all, though they can obviously satisfy someone's cravings when they need to avoid real meat.
There is an allergy referred to as Alpha-Gal (RadioLab did an episode) which can be contracted after a tick bite, in which one is left allergic to meat, including beef, pork, lamb, venison, mutton, goat, and bison. As someone who likes meat and lives in tick country, this was horrifying to hear about. According to the Impossible people, it is safe for those with the allergy, which I find some comfort.
#Metoo