Elsewhere (307)

Mary Davis, [dean of the University of Kentucky’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law,] wrote she has begun to “force myself to accept white inferiority,” and that it is “really hard.”
What. The. Actual. F*ck…?

These are not good people. They do not mean well.
So much that. But it’s the brazenness of it that’s astounding, and the people who defend these not good people.

Sociopaths, armed with both sides of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Foolish people thinking they are wiser than they are, and normal people assuming that the fools surely must be wise if they hold themselves in such high esteem.

Ben Sixsmith mentioned Gabriel Matzneff in his article. There was a famous interview in 1990 on Bernard Pivot’s programme ‘Apostrophes’ in which Matzneff, the famous writer, was encouraged to boast of his habitual child molestation to the general applause, sniggering, and head-nodding of the ‘literary’ panel. It was all rather spoiled however when a rude colonial – apparently, the only creature with a moral compass in the area – pointed out the monstrosity of his behaviour. You can find it online. Here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0LQiv7x4xs

Ben Sixsmith on when paedophilia was avant-garde…Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading student activist in the 1968 unrest and a prominent member of the Greens…
The battle cry of the French soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters) was “It is forbidden to forbid” and among the things that they said should not be forbidden was the sexual exploitation of children. I get the impression that this was true of the sixties Left throughout the West. It would be interesting to see what fraction of the leading intellectual lights of the sixties Left were involved in that. (Not that this should surprise us: Leftism is inherently based on the use and abuse of human beings.)

I get the impression that this was true of the sixties Left throughout the West.
Now that I have actually read the linked article, I see that it confirms that in detail.

I totally ignore all these racists who are trying to destroy white man’s culture and achievements while enjoying them.

From Khan’s review:

Murray proposes that Americans will be able to achieve a modus vivendi with racial inequality if they renew their faith in the American creed. […] I share Murray’s yearning, but the world he wishes to resurrect is now a generation in the past. We have to face another truth: fewer and fewer Americans attend the church that adheres to the American creed nowadays. Facing Reality enjoins us to return to a faith that, alas, may already be irretrievable.

More often one sees the sad admission that America or the West of yore is dead and gone, and that a new approach will be needed. Thing is, that America/West never existed, and the thing that people of a certain age remember is a world run, more or less, by serious people. What we need is very simple but extremely difficult to implement: personal accountability.
Far too many cultural, political, and private matters are viewed thru the lens of collective responsibility. This allows blame to be diffused among the many and therefore nullified and never properly examined, much less addressed. It turns real problems into abstractions, while hysterically elevating impossible-to-solve abstractions to Beelzebub status, the counter to which is always one more snake oil vial away. Liberal democracy gives the veneer of consent and ensures we will never know just who exactly to blame for policy disasters – if the disaster is even recognized as such among the chaos the activist sow.
Personal accountability will return, it’s just a matter of how. You can hang a few now, or many more later, but sooner or later aggrieved people will find someone to blame -regardless of their true guilt – and hold them to account.

There’s a common thread between the “white fragility” hustlers, the abjuration of accountability, and a Ghostbusters movie that’s mostly about a single mom fretting about her on-the-trendy-spectrum daughter while ignoring her fatherless teenage son.
You’re not the blog commenter we deserve, but you are the one we need.

I’m trying to imagine a producer getting a green light for a remake of High Noon set in the present day, in one of the more vibrant neighborhoods of a major metropolitan area. Not a gritty postmodern reimagining with some deeply flawed antihero, but an actual Gary Cooper type trying to get his neighbors to stand up for themselves. One can almost hear the arguments about audience expectations and box office returns.
(I was going to add a reference to Paula Cole’s Where Have All The Cowboys Gone, but just realized that it was released 25 years ago and now I think I’ll just take an antacid and a nap before I yell at the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn.)

set in the present day, in one of the more vibrant neighborhoods of a major metropolitan area.
Wasn’t that essentially Gran Torino?
Not entirely unrelated.
I am old enough to remember Kurtzmann and Orci shitting up the Xena franchise by making Gabrielle a pacifist and pandering hard to the 16-year-old girls they obviously thought were the show’s primary demographic. The episode in which Renaissance Pictures forcibly took back the reins was epic.
I don’t think Kevin Feige was a genius; I just think he understood what a superhero movie was, who was watching them, and what they wanted to see. As William Goldman pointed out, there are a lot of perverse incentives in the Hollywood studio system that prevent this from being all you need to get a successful mainstream action movie made, but still.

I am old enough to remember Kurtzmann and Orci shitting up the Xena franchise by making Gabrielle a pacifist and pandering hard to the 16-year-old girls they obviously thought were the show’s primary demographic.
I know nothing about the series, but it is absurd for a sword-wielding barbarian heroine to have a pacifist sidekick.

FTFY
Correction: I know about the Modern Major General parody of the series. 🙂

I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
Through Herculean efforts, I’ve become humanitarian.
I ride throughout the hinterland — at least that’s what they call it in
Those sissy towns like Athens (I, myself, am Amphipolitan).
I travel with a poet who is perky and parthenian
And scribbles her hexameters in Linear Mycenian
(And many have attempted, by a host of methods mystical,
To tell if our relationship’s sororal or sapphistical).
…

it is absurd for a sword-wielding barbarian heroine to have a pacifist sidekick
Yes. Especially since they were already responding to the criticism that Gabrielle occupied the position of Robin the Boy Hostage in a way that Hercules’ sidekick did not by training Renee O’Connor in staff fighting. With, er, mixed success but give her credit for trying.
That season was…special. Timothy Omundson as an erstwhile hippie Jesus, plotlines that revealed that Xena and Gabrielle invented both the Venus/female symbol and mehndi, Gabrielle foregoing her staff to fight with a metsubishi[1] and becoming a vegan pacifist – it was everything a not terribly bright marketing intern might return from a search on “what 16 year old girls like”.
Mr Kurtzman’s knack for failing upwards
He’s made a lot of money in films, of the type where you just have to throw CGI at the screen and use a recognized IP and you’re guaranteed to make money. His TV projects are generally low-budget genre throwaways; I’m guessing he’s a man whose mediocre talent can be adequately concealed by a huge CGI budget when one is available.
To tell if our relationship’s sororal or sapphistical
Sororal. That’s Word of God. The lesbian overtones were injected when the writers found out that the show was wildly popular in women’s prisons because of the accidental butch/femme dynamic, so they started throwing in bits explicitly to tweak them.
[1] That’s a little pot with a blowhole used to blow sleeping powder into the faces of miscreants, not a motorcycle. Although frankly, Gabrielle fighting on and/or with a motorcycle could only have improved that season.

I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
That’s delightful. How have I gone this many years without ever running across it?

films, of the type where you just have to throw CGI at the screen and use a recognized IP and you’re guaranteed to make money.
Looking back, I have accompanied friends many times to showings of crappy comic/superhero/sci-fi movies, just to be sociable.

pandering hard to the 16-year-old girls they obviously thought were the show’s primary demographic
That series was aimed at teenage girls?
* drools at memory of Xena *

The lesbian overtones
Band name.

A classy individual, to represent America at the Olympics. Truly the apex of civilization.

This is what I believe is promising
You weren’t the target audience for the first film, you were the target audience for the second and third[1], and you are absolutely not the ideal demographic for a franchise relaunch that aims to be faithful to the first.
Inasmuch as woke politics is just pandering to suburban Karens, there’s tons of it in the trailers. The heroic single mom, the trendy-spectrum genius daughter who gets all the action scenes, the meathead teenage son, the token black girlfriend, the useless schlub male lead – you could CGI Slimer into an episode of Reba and call it a day.
Most of that demographic doesn’t really know the original like their boomer grandparents do
Most of that demographic doesn’t care about Ghostbusters. The entire point of franchise relaunches is pre-awareness – you don’t have to do as much marketing if your core demographic already knows what your movie is about and will go see it no matter how much it stinks. Now, at one point the conventional wisdom was that you had to massage the property to alsobring in the average moviegoer who didn’t know the IP and just wanted to see a movie Friday night, to be decided on upon arrival at the cineplex. Hence gratuituous lens flares, CGI, and recognizable stars, because the core demo wasn’t large enough to float a mass market movie.
That’s long since ceased to be the case. Pace pst314 above, studios know they have to cater to the fans because the fans will drag their friends along and do the viral marketing the studios don’t want to pay for. Ghostbusters is also not an obscure comic book property known only by nerds; it was a massive box office success and had multiple theatrical re-releases.
The 2021 Ghostbusters seems to think its core demographic is middle-aged suburban single moms. It is wrong. I expect it will do all right on its first weekend, much like Black Widow and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did, and then crater on the second weekend as the actual demographic spreads the word. Or the movie itself, via digital piracy.
Since I haven’t seen “Stranger Things,” I don’t have that lens to view it through
It’s every 80’s movie aimed at or starring kids, smashed up together with a blue filter, lugubrious direction and whatever stunt casting they could afford. It’s what happens when your KPI is nostalgia/pop culture references per minute of screen time.
[1] There’s a reason they bombed.

These are not good people. They do not mean well.
At least two of them are friends of mine…or I suppose I should say former friends. I’ve heard that white fragility crap from one aimed directly at me for discussing something that he was flat out wrong about…I think it had to do with George Zimmerman. I’ve seen at least one other person use it in a broader sense. Several others either didn’t understand what it was or simply accepted it.

@Daniel Ream, I think what teeth I have left have been significantly ground down by me watching gratuitous lens flares, and the average moviegoer (if I’m not he) would probably say the same. Lens flares are practically never not gratuitous. It’s not even going out on a limb to say no one ever bought a ticket on purpose to see them. We are resigned to lens flares, and wait for the fashion to pass.
In every other respect, your analysis of the marketing of Ghostbusters and its ilk, is (JMHO) the goods.

Lens flares are practically never not gratuitous
I literally facepalmed the day I learned that in many CGI scenes of naturalistic backdrops, the digital artists insert lens flares because we’ve become so accustomed to seeing them in movies that we expect them when the POV pans near a strong light source (for those unfamiliar, lens flares result from tiny imperfections in real optical lenses that scatter light from a strong source like the Sun. You don’t see them if you go outside and look at a sunny sky, and there’s no reason for them to exist in a realistic sky scene. They’re entirely an artifact of imperfect filmmaking technology)
except possibly those with well known styles like John Ford or Hitchcock
As a filmmaking snob, I both agree and disagree with you. Directors with a recognizable style are outliers precisely because they tend to be polarizing. If a producer wants a reliable mass market ROI vehicle, they’ll stay away from a direction style that’s likely to veer too far into pretentious artsiness. On the other hand, if you’re trying to make a movie where the direction is a big part of what you’re offering the audience, a director with a distinct vision is important.
Even with mass market ROI vehicles, direction is important even if the average moviegoer doesn’t really notice it. “Michael Bay movies” is a punchline for a reason.

Suspend the crew? I’d buy them drinks.

That’s delightful. How have I gone this many years without ever running across it?
pst314 didn’t even quote the best parts. The whole thing is here, and it’s worth every pixel.

Public awareness of movie directors wasn’t always the mass-phenomenon it became from the 1970s on; but already in the 1920s through early sixties a substantial part of the audience did know and care about directing, and they weren’t film snobs. They went to the same pictures and watched them the same way as everyone else, and often as not would have named much the same favorite films. Being able to pick out what the director has done adds a dimension to the enjoyment, even though it’s complete without: same as in any other art experience, the more you know the greater the pleasure, because it’s yet one more way you can turn the experience over in your mind

Black privilege
Well, Mr Kendi is by no means a gifted or rigorous thinker. His outpourings are a patchwork of unsupported statements, factual errors, and life-ruining advice. He tells us, for instance, that black people are somehow harmed by expectations of competence, reciprocation and effort – which he disdains as “racist” – and can only be “liberated” when they “reject cultural standards,” i.e., personal responsibility, diligence, punctuality, etc. And his books are given to children in middle schools across the US.
Luckily for Mr Kendi, he seems to inhabit a world in which claims needn’t be supported with evidence, or be coherently articulated. His adult audiences are remarkably, pathologically, indulgent, and seemingly untroubled by the scarcity of evidence, the wild inaccuracies, and the disregard for logic.
As noted in the thread following this,

It occurs to me that if your own career and status are in large part the result of racial favouritism and racial double standards, of pretentious cooing and unwarranted indulgence – which is to say, of an environment without probity, an insincere place – then you could easily suppose that that’s how everything works, everywhere. And that other people – all those white devils, for instance – can only have achieved whatever they’ve achieved by similarly dubious means, by being a certain hue, and are therefore undeserving of whatever it is they have…
It’s easier to sell the idea that the wider society is racially fixated and racially corrupt, and driven by racial “privilege” – with exemptions from normal corrections and reciprocal obligations – if the social and academic environment of the person making such claims, and their protégées, is geared to precisely those things.

Just a thought.

which probably involves large transfers of cash.
He’s evidently good at parting racially neurotic lefties from their money, and their sense. He may be a stranger to logic and evidence, to facts of almost any kind, and he may beg questions at a rate of knots, but he hustles like a pro. He knows a progressive rube when he sees one. As so often, the audiences Mr Kendi attracts tend to be more interesting than he is, at least morbidly. His grifter’s patter is the standard contortion of his kind and therefore tedious, but the people who sit and listen, and fawn and coo, are supposedly educated, generally at great expense. Critical thinkers, no less. And yet they reliably ignore the tautologies, the evasions, and the obvious factual errors. Because…
And there’s something almost funny about Mr Kendi pointedly using the words skill and expertise when referring to people such as himself. But mainly himself, one assumes.
[ Edited. ]

As always, it’s easy to be caught up in the stereotyping. It’s a useful method to categorize people, but harmful when it’s used in politics and public policy. I would not characterize myself as a film snob for paying attention to mis en scene and certain director’s trademarks, because when you’re watching a Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright, or (obviously, from my name) Tarantino movie, you can’t help but see them.
(In fact, I’ll be seeing Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” in the theater even tho I generally do not like horror movies.)
If anything, I’m the film snob’s nightmare. I’m a fan of good storytelling, despise Rotten Tomatoes for reducing criticism to unhelpful percentages, and appreciate sometimes despised actors (Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy, who both seem to inspire unhinged rage by the mere mention of their names) in what I consider to be good movies (the near-universally despised “Holmes & Watson” and McCarthy’s Atlanta-based movies like “Tammy.”).

semi retired conservative: ’ And I for one have had enough of smarmy kids in every fucking movie being made..’
Amen! About the only movies I’m currently looking forward to are ‘Suicide Squad’, the ‘Top Gun’ sequel and Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ (though that only really for the ‘why…?’ aspect).
Guaranteed no smarmy kids.

To be a bit clearer again, I can sometimes appreciate a bad film for reasons beyond the whole. What really impresses me are the films with large crowd scenes or a huge cast. I was even an extra in one such film once, a not very good film, that helped me appreciate how much effort, work, coordination, etc. goes into producing such things. I get that. My concern is that the eye is off the ball of creating a good work that tells a good story and is now about damn near everything else. So smaaaaart people at cocktail parties can talk all smaaaart.

His adult audiences are remarkably, pathologically, indulgent, and seemingly untroubled by the scarcity of evidence, the wild inaccuracies, and the disregard for logic.
Yeah, but that’s not just his audiences. That’s the broader market. He’s successful because the damage was done, the battlefield was cleared for him by academia, the media, the arts, etc. He can reach so far because he stands on the shoulders of giants…so to speak…’ogres’ perhaps a better word.

I think I read that very same proverb once in The Curia…
Was that the blog that the insufferable Hal9000 kept linking to?

I’m getting old. How did that happen so fast?
“Oh my paws and whiskers!”

Priest sews lips together to protest climate change ignorance his need for psychiatric care.

…need for psychiatric care.
Speaking of which, there is certainly no argument about the “bitch” part.

I always suspect HAL9000 was the author of that hot mess.
Strongly suspected, verging on certainty.

I always suspect HAL9000 was the author of that hot mess.
No doubt about it, but look on the bright side, Steve, no longer is yours also The Avatar of Shame.
Says that she is not “out” to her family, and yet posts that video.
It depends on what is meant by “out” I suspect her family has known she is off plumb for quite a while.

re Hal9000…he had his moments. The one that gets me to this day, and this day because this day I spent getting attacked by yellow jackets, is minnow. That vespoligist extraordinaire. Ashamed he still gets in my head but the bastard insulted my dog. Unforgivable.

The problem predates mass home consumption by at least a dozen years. I date this problem to the increasing influence of movie reviewers and the snob society that gained traction in the 1970’s. Was it here or Ace where someone commented on the waitress/diner scene in Six Easy Pieces being elitist crap? The thing about S&E that I recall was watching them for their insight but despising their (especially Ebert’s) attitudes. Way too much importance on things that distract from the story. So you get these stunning reviews for meh stuff like Grand Canyon and such. What really amuses me is how they could mockingly dismiss things like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar then decades later turn around and gush…ok, not totally gush but YKWIM, about them.

the snob word
@WTP, I didn’t mean to object to your use of the term film snobs: I know they do exist and aplenty, and they’re a menace. But I don’t think there’s markedly more film snobbery than there ever was. It’s just that what used to be an individual quirk is now schooled in. People who don’t have any innate propensity for snobbery hear the gab and join in. Their voices get magnified and repeated by our media. It’s a kind of poison (not fatal, maybe, but wasting) to the culture, but the publicity echo chamber finds it useful.

it looks like it’s going to be a terrible movie.
I’m going to politely disagree
All good points @Darleen, but the original Ghostbusters was a comedy above all else. The next generation/sequel/reboot is not. Is there an audience for (what looks like) a “Ghostbusters coming of age story”? I think not.

In honor of Harry’s wife, Kendi is a giver. Won’t you be too ?

I wouldn’t put it past Driscoll to rehash something he wrote 9 years ago and pretend otherwise, but that’s not being very charitable.
Heh.
Thanks for the effort, though.
Limited effort. I only looked at the first page or two of search results.

Small blessings.
In that category: I have been forgetting all the details of what Hal and minnow said. And if there were even earlier trolls I have forgotten even their names.

Steve, no longer is yours also The Avatar of Shame.
By the way, I never did figure out your trick for changing avatars at will. I thought you might be using a VPN or something else that changed your IP address every time you commented.

…has…

New Landmark: Bridge Designed by Equitable and Inclusive Mathematics Program Celebrates Grand Opening

…with…

Now you’re just showing off. ;p