What is wrong with Rings of Power and the criticism of the critics

So Rings of Power season two is coming out, and the flame-wars flared up again on social media. So let's take a look at why people hated the show. Although hate is a strong word. Disliked is more like it. I am quite apathetic, myself, despite being a 'Tolkien fan'. (I've read all books, even the Silmarillion, AND I have read LoTR once every year for more than a decade. I think I know the source material somewhat.)

 

1. The show has nothing to do with Tolkien's world (yes, yes, they only bought 150 lines, so they could not use more, I know the drill)

 

2. The whole set, everything looked incredibly cheap and artificial despite the budget. Just look at the set, the clothing, the armor, weapons, and compare it, not to the LoTR movies, but to GoT. The difference is jarring. Rubber armor vs actual metal armor. Actual design differences based on region. The sets look like lived in, actual environments, not like a green screen. Game of Thrones had a much lower budget, and somehow did better in this regard. Heck the movies had lower budgets than this shit.

3. Characters were off; and seriously off. Galandriel, Elrond and the rest had no connection whatsoever to their actual selves described in Tolkien's works. They were different characters altogether, not to mention their decisions, their interactions were forced. It all served to move the story forward, so they made choices that were required for that to happen, and not what they would have made had they been actual characters.

4. The story was absolute and utter shit - it was worse than an average fan fiction, to be honest. Was more like a Warhammer 40K book by Guy Haley -bolter porn, in other words. It made no sense. Let me repeat. The story makes absolutely no sense. None. I have no idea how people cannot see how ridiculously idiotic the story is. I guess people do not use their brains, just let the show wash over them without thinking, mesmerized by the shiny stuff and action. But let me stress it: at this point in the story, Galandriel is solely responsible for the return of Sauron. And she never told anyone that the great evil lord is back; somehow it never occurred to her. And this is only one of the idiotic things. Let's not mention not-Gandalf, the sociopathic and evil not-Hobbits, who, despite being an isolated, small community, manage to be more diverse than a Starbucks in Beverly Hills. The weird vulcano-trigger thingy, and why it was created, and why it was activated. Forget about the greatest smiths of all time not knowing how to make alloys, the incredibly stupid and hamfisted THEY ARE TAKING YOUR JOBS, MAKE NUMENOR GREAT AGAIN nod to current day politics and the rest. I would love to see people defend the various story lines and "character development", but so far I could see no actual argument justifying the jumps in logic and the lack of good writing apart from "duH, yOU DoN'T LikE It, dOn'T wAtCh It. HAter".

5. The performative diversity was jarring, especially that this was the main point of the marketing campaign, instead of how they wanted to bring Tolkien into the screen. They showed a very diverse cast of 'Tolkien Experts' who apparently had no idea about what Tolkien wrote apart from what made it into the movies, because they had no issues with the lore-breaking stuff they were allowed to see before the show was aired for the rest of us, peasants. (Again: Game of Thrones did diversity as well- but it made sense there. You do not see Asian or black people among the First Men or Wildlings over the wall sprinkled in the cast. It makes sense geographically and ethnicly. Because what da ya know. You can have dragons AND diversity that makes sense. Who knew?) But diversity was the message they were going with, this is what they marketed with, and then used it as a tool to shoot down any and all criticism. You don't like the show? YOU HORRIBLE RACIST AND SEXIST MONSTER. This tactic was utilized with every shit show from Ghostbusters 2016 onwards, but here's an idea: how about not making a shit product, and then you would not need to fall back to this defense? Not to mention it does not work. It does not actually guilt trip people into loving the show. It only serves as a way for the showrunners to suck their own dicks (metaphorically, since many of these people are women) how it is not their fault their creation failed.

6. The showrunners said they deliberately changed the story, so it would surprise people who do know the history of Middle Earth. What the actual fuck. I mean... how? How do you come up with an idiotic take like this? Well, surprise us they did.

 

 

And if you do not believe me, go back in time, read the raving reviews in the Guardian, etc when it came out, calling anyone, who does not like it, a MAGA loving, evil fascist, sexist, racist, culture-war waging incel asshole, essentially saying that if you are a good person you just LOVE the show, but god forbid if you do not. Then jump ahead in time and read the reviews from the very same people saying that the show was not very good. If you think there was no concerted effort to sell this piece of shit to the public when it comes out (the known issues with access media), you are quite naive. Taken all this, especially the attacks on the fans, makes people a tad... upset. Wexed, even. Or even galled, exasperated, or I would hazard, irked. I may go as far as riled, really. So yeah. Bring on season 2. 

Gender issues- argument from victimhood

 The scenario:

Step 1. Make a generalization about a group that is ideally less than kind.

Step 2. Get eviscerated by the internet

Step 3. Change your name and hide your head in shame.

If you make any negative generalization about women, blacks, gays, Muslims, whatever, normally this is what happens. People, who have images on their profiles with texts like "be kind to others" and whatnot will descend on you like a pack of furies to point out that you cannot and should not generalize in such a way. Which is fair. You really should not. First, because it is morally wrong (you know, it is "-ist", depending on if it is based on race or sex or whatever: racist, sexist, etc.), and it is also stupid because normally real-life evidence does not support it. 

Unless... unless you make remarks about men, especially white men.

Then the scenario will change considerably.

Step 1. Make an insulting generalization about men, depicting women as poor, suffering victims.

Step 2. When someone tries to argue about this, attack their person ("you are the reason we choose the bear" is the newest one, but the good, old "incel" always works)

Step 3. Watch as everyone descends on those people who dare to contradict your bigoted generalization to tear them to shreds. (And they are lucky if it does not impact their employment status...)

This interesting change in outcomes can be seen everywhere. You are absolutely not allowed to make generalizations about, say, Muslims (do try to bring up integration in European culture), while the very same people who label you an Islamophobe will absolutely murder you if you dare to challenge their open misandry. 

The responses normally can be sorted out into these categories:

1. open ad hominem attacks (the above mentioned "you are the reason we choose the bears")

2. how dare you question our experiences? All women are suffering (myself included), and you have no right to question us. Don't dare to mansplain. Especially go away with your statistical evidence. 

3. how dare you give context? (For example, pointing out that domestic violence is not a simplistic "man beats woman" issue.) "Whataboutism", "fragile ego", 'you must be the problem because you are defending abusers', OR, my favorite, "this is a safe space for women's issues, don't bring men's issues into it". But when you do it in a "safe space for men", first of all, you are an incel and a red piller, and then women's issues are immediately brought into the conversation just to show how much worse they have it. Just try it somewhere. Anywhere.

4. Yes, but. Male issues pale in comparison. It is simply not worth talking about them. And Patriarchy hurts men, too. And if you solve women's issues, you solve men's, too.

So yeah. You cannot win, because in the current zeitgeist, women are absolutely oppressed (even though the facts don't actually support this), hence they have the upper hand in the conversation- after all, if you have certified victimhood, you win by default. 

Now this is where I should bring up a sure-fire strategy to win in these conversations, but the fact is you cannot. 

The main problem is that these (mostly) women take an immense amount of glee of bullying people they disagree with into submission, all the while displaying their victimhood status - kind of like the concept of virgin prostitute. Because make no mistake: these people are some of the worst bullies you can find. Ironically, the very same tactic is used against feminists when it comes to trans issues - and they suddenly learn what it means to be bullied in this way, and do not like it very much. And in the case of Kathleen Stock, they demand that men stand by them. Ironic, I guess. 

Especially if it is online, it is best not to engage, because as the saying goes about wrestling with pigs - you both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it (and you cannot win - this is not done on an intellectual level). So however infuriating/sad/worrying it is to read bigoted comments, sometimes open hatred, you cannot do anything. Reporting these comments will do nothing, since, as we already established, these "truths" are universally accepted today. It is just another example of how polarized (and stupid) our society became, where one half of the population is seen as a threat, as something unnecessary, or even as an enemy, essentially by women who probably do not apply the same views to their own male relatives and friends. Nevertheless the "I hate blacks, but you are OK, because I know you" was never a good excuse for racism. Neither is it a good excuse for sexism. Yes, they probably will grow up eventually and realize that men and women mutually need each other, but in the meanwhile these views do an immense amount of damage to young men, to society at large, not to mention these views are propagated to the next batch of young, privileged women enjoying the feeling of victimhood. Or worse, middle aged women blaming all their failures on men. 

Woke: a right wing idiocy, or something that actually matters?

 So, whenever someone brings up the word "woke" lately the people who can be described as such immediately jump on it, claiming that it is a made-up insult by the lunatic Right to discredit those worthy progressive ideas. 

This ignores the fact that this is merely a shorthand to describe those ideas, and not an insult as such, let alone the issue that the word had been used with pride as a self-identification not a few years ago... (Selective memory strikes again.)

But how about the original claim? Namely that the progressive ideas (which are called progressive, although there is nothing progressive about racism and sexism) permeated our whole culture?

If you look at entertainment -She Hulk, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvels, Terminator, Netflix shows and so on and so on -it is quite plain to see. Gender and race swaps even in historical figures, girl bosses who would be described as toxic males had they been written as a man, (white) men can only be incompetent or evil, and the rest. Rewriting books to "reflext current sensibilities", banning and burning books, toppling statues, pushing for legislations that are based on identity politics, promoting people based on their sex and/or race to high positions -the list is long. But if you want further proof, look no further than Google's latest image generator.

Which caused quite a lot of stirr when it refused to depict white people in historical pictures of vikings, popes and even Nazis. (And this is not the only AI that does it.) I really love the fact  that the Funding Fathers were depicted as black -makes the whole slavery thing a bit more confusing. When it finally does generate a white, blond, blue eyed Scandinavian, it is a picture of an Indian woman with blonde hair and light skin. It simply refused to generate white people's images, as it would be "harmful content". 

Now google is claiming that it is merely a matter of inaccuracies in some historical photos. 

Which is obviously not -see the issue about the refusal to generate current Scandinavians' images. (By the way, obviously while diversity is important for google, it is not that important. It does not insert random whites into non-white historical and other pictures. I have yet to see a white Malcom X generated. This is also interesting in the whole performative diversity exercise by the entertainment industry: not many random blacks and whites were placed in the Chinese army in Mulan, and reasonably few Asians and whites were shown as citizens of Wakanda.)

There is also a claim that it was merely rushed, and that they set up the filters incorrectly. 

So what is it then?

Well, the obvious answer is that it is the evidence of a glaring anti-white bias programmed into the AI. (See here for an explanation how it is happening. In short, google is "wokifying" your promts.) There are signs that there are some activists working at google injecting in their own politics into their product.

Which is bad in itself, but it also shows how this sort of bias is wide-spread and normalized in "high society": you know, entertainment, tech and the rest. You know, in those circles which dominate our everyday lives.

And it will have serious consequences.

First, wokeness actively destroys meritocracy, as it is. This is not about a stupid image generator (or two). It is about the underlying ideology. All system has some built-in tolerance for less capable people, but when it becomes systemic, well... just think about the following question: would you prefer your neurosurgeon to be a diversity hire? Or the people desiging your airplane? Or the flight crew flying it? If you significantly increase the level of incompetence in the whole of a civilization, it will collapse under its own weight.

Second, it will promote serious blacklash. I mean you are actively telling a majority (in Western countries whites are still a majority, you know) that they are trash, and promote others over them based on their skin color. What do you think will happen? (Same with men, although they are not the majority, they are "just" half the population.)

Third, you are completely changing the past and present. This tool, now, is a novelty. You can joke about it, and claim people are racist for pointing out the obvious idiocy and bias, but but it will grow. It will be a large part of our lives, and it is actively lying. In twenty years these weird images of the Funding Fathers will be "real". It will completely confuse the issue of white settlers declaring independence, saying 'all men are created equal' while owning slaves. (Not that there are no lies and misinformation about the whole slavery thing currently, but this will put those to shame.) It will show you ethnic minorities and women in SS garbs, which probably would make Hitler spin in his grave -if he had one. (Maybe this is a way to find his remains.) If you cannot trust AI, if it seeds untruthful information into our collective body of knowledge, it will have disastorous consequences. Culture, history, entertainment, science -nothing is free from this threat of getting "relativized". There will be no factual reality left. Absolute loss of trust in anything. Again; this will destroy the fabric of a civilization.

So here you go. We will diversify ourselves into obscurity, while the Chinese -who are struggling with their own problem of impeding population collapse admittedly- are laughing at our self-inflicted wounds.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence - the most idiotic thing you can say in an educated crowd

There are several arguments to justify not taking part in a debate or trying to censor other viewpoints, which I will address in another post, but this post is only about this one particular "thought".

You hear this often from people who claim that there is no such thing as "cancel culture", and justify people losing their jobs, their positions, getting in trouble with the police and having a social backlash for saying that does not agree with their "progressive" views with saying "well, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". But. This statement is incredibly stupid if you spend just one minute thinking about it. And highlight what the issue is, here's a similar quote.  

"There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech"

Idi Amin

And just who is this Idi Amin? A prominent anti-racist, perhaps? A progressive icon of identity politics? An esteemed gender studies author?

Well... Not exactly. He is your stereotypical African dictator from the '60s-'70s with coups, murder, torture, child soldiers and fancy uniforms. (With a possible death toll of 300 000 if you ignore all the civil wars he was responsible for.)

I used to make the point that if the sentence in the title was true, in that case even Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and East Germany had freedom of speech. After all, you could shout that "comrade Stalin can suck my dick" -you were absolutely free to do so. This is the logic of these people. The consequences would be there, obviously, but the speech itself was free. In the case of telling Stalin to perform autofellatio, it would be a bullet in the back of your head, but you can die in the safe knowledge that the speech was free. The consequence was there, though. This, as the real world example of Idi Amin shows just, an empty play with words. We all understand what freedom of speech means. Obviously there are limits -and it is always a matter of debate where those limits exactly are- but the whole idea is that you can only take part in the "marketplace of ideas" if you do not have to be afraid.

And "consequences" do make one to be afraid. Having to think of consequences when you try to say that trans women are not women does stifle speech. (I got banned from reddit for saying this. In Scotland you can get the police coming to your house if you post this. You can lose your job for this.) Having to worry about your family when you decide whether to say your opinion about something in your workplace, at your university, in social media is exactly the opposite of what the marketplace of ideas should be. It is self-imposed censorship due to the fear of consequences. In other words: the exact opposite of "freedom of speech".

Meet Richard Dawkins- the new Alt-Right Icon

 Oh boy.

Richard Dawkins have a few words on trans issues and woke in general.

This will seriously blow minds on "the Left". Most people, it seems like, have very deep, embedded tribalistic urges. You have to accept *all* dogmas in order to belong to the tribe. If you do not -well, it must mean you are member of the *other* tribe- you know, the evil ones we have to destroy, so you are an enemy. (Punch a Nazi, Kill a TERF, #killallwhitemen - you know the drill.) Weirdly enough these things do not trigger any wide-spread Left-wing protestations, as even Ukrainian soldiers wearing actual Nazi insignia are no problem (now it's "complicated") -but showing an OK sign absolutely means you *are* a Nazi. But this is besides the point -all part of the tribe-thing. 

The problem comes when people who are on the Left have issues with the new, identity-politics based "Left", and point out the inconsistencies, the lies, and the straight out idiocy. They immediately become hated, right-wing figures, regardless of what ideas they really hold. See: Rowling.

There are a lof of these views, sometimes mutually contradictory, but the "woke" could always gaslight, suppress and intimidate people on all sides to accept them on face value - see how things like "gender is a spectrum", "sex is a spectrum", "white privilege", the redefining of what sexism and racism means, the "gender pay gap", "racist math", BLM issues, issues about domestic violence, etc. are absolutely dominated by their narrative. Anyone deviating from the officially accepted dogma will be labelled as a heretic or worse. These people took over academia, even the STEM sciences (just read Scientific American and Nature articles), policy making - and everything else. They became truths. 

All dissenting voices are now on the fringe, and can be ignored, since only alt-right Nazis have these opinions. There is no need for a conversation. In fact, just engaging in a conversation with these Nazis only validates their views, so we have to ban them, censor them, and make sure they are destroyed in every conceivable way. Of course it is illiberal, but we, liberals, cannot tolerate intolerance. Obviously. It shows an incredible lack of self-awareness for them not to recognize that they are the intolerant ones in this paradox, who were tolerated by the liberal majority and now took over the narrative. This sort of mentality is not new -if they could, they would still make ice statuses of people like in the good ole' days. Heck, just look at Reddit. 

For a post that asked exactly what "hateful ideas" Rowling propagated I was permanently banned from r/fantasy for being a Nazi who has no business to be on reddit. Yes, the mod did call me a Nazi. OK, I guess, Dawkins is a Nazi, too, because boy, he had some opinions for sure. He did not just ask.... He said some pretty hateful things. Like sex is binary. And men have no place competing against women in sports. That female spaces should not be invaded by men. You know - worse than Hitler. When I literally made his points in r/scienceuncensored, my account was banned for promoting hate. (My post was about not accepting the strict distinction between gender and sex, and that trans women are not women.)

Anyhow

Richard Dawkins is a special case - he is very much the darling of the Right-hating hard-core "leftists", because he never was shy about confronting religious and other dogmas. Since despite of all the evidence, this new "Left" prides itself being evidence-based, science-based and rational, they will absolutely claim someone who is a humanist and an unwavering rationalist to be their champion.

Except he isn't. He seems to confront -as any true humanists and liberal should- dogmas from all sides.

This is a welcome news for many different reasons. First, finally people, who are visible, and have very real credentials in hard sciences are standing up for the truth. I mean I, too, am a biologist, but my voice means nothing; if I engage in this issue, I will lose a lot of friends on one hand, and if I do it publicly, I can be very easily cancelled and end up like Richard Bilkszto who was bullied until he committed suicide. Intellectual giants, like Dawkins, cannot be dismissed, cancelled or tarred and feathered so easily.

Second, it feels nice to be vindicated. For years now I have felt I may be going insane. I held opinions that I felt were based on reality, which were taken as hateful, alt-right views by "the establishment". To name a few: women are not oppressed by men - there is no Patriarchy today, there is a victim-olympics going on currently with all the critical theories (4th wave of feminism and CRT particular), that Academia has been overtaken by ideologs, that trans women are NOT women, that sex is binary (and race is not), yet somehow we can change sex (but not race), that gender is an idiotic construct that was invented in the "Grievance Studies" line of "sciences", that freedom of speech is important even if conservatives are the ones being silenced, and so on and so forth - and these things are very much going against what Nature, Sci American, Guardian, WaPo, Hollywood, policy makers, etc., etc. push. I guess this is what it feels like to be gaslighted. You are still very much the left-leaning liberal who feels that he had not changed, yet suddenly now his views place him squarely into the freely punchable group. (And that also now he is suddenly evil because of his immutable characteristics of being white and male... something he did not feel ten years ago.) Having Dawkins express the same thoughts I hold means I may not actually going insane, but that the inmates truly are running the asylum. May not be a good thing if you look at the big picture (one guy going nuts vs the whole world), but at least it is conforming to me.

So yes. I guess the tides are turning. There will be still people who fall victim of the woke mob, but now there are credible voices raised. Let's see what happens now.

So apparently men are to blame for the Mating Gap

 As an upcoming book states, there is a lack of eligible men for these women to have babies with. (There are so many gaps now - there is an opportunity for a dirty joke here for sure.)

Obviously. The author is a professor of anthropology at Yale, after all, so she must know.

Now before we go further I want you to imagine the following scenario (and I know it is going to be a controversial and strenuous analogy, but bear with me). A historian wants to understand the reasons of the collapse of the Third Reich, so what does he (or she) do? Read all the interviews, speeches, memoirs about what Hitler thought the reasons were, and then writes a book that "the Jews were behind it".

This is literally the methodology. As the author says, she gathered egg freezing stories from 150 American women and analyzed them. 

And obviously the results are (drum roll):

• Men who are reluctant to partner with high-achieving women, leaving these women single for many years.
• Men who are unready for marriage and children, often leading to relationship demise.
• Men who exhibit bad behavior, including infidelity and ageism, which often leads to relationship instability and rupture.

So, as we know, it is all men's fault. The first point is patently false -there are lots and lots of studies showing the opposite, as in women are reluctant to engage with men under their own status while the opposite is not true. Heck, even the Guardian (which was very enthusiastic about writing about this issue highlighted in the book) wrote about it. 

I am fairly certain if you ask incels why they can't get a partner you will get a similar list, but obviously those basement-dwelling jerks would be wrong. For some reason people tend to rationalize why they are not to blame. Who knew. So it is very striking to base your methodology on accepting anything your subjects say on face value. And also not correcting for the fact that egg freezing is something that is only a serious reality for about 1% of the population. This is the very definition of Grievance Studies at work -it is men who cheat, it is men who refuse to settle down, it is men who are ageist and refuse to date higher status/earning women. All of which is patently false, or ignores the current reality of how the "new" society (patterns in education, economics, etc.) -and feminism itself-  disenfranchised men, and made marriage less than attractive. Or simply ignores the fact that women seem to have unrealistic expectations.

There are other voices that provide explanation about the "death of marriage" -and it ain't those blasted men who refuse to grow up and cheat with everyone with a vagina. They come both from the left and right.

Now, there are three things to be mentioned here. 

One is that the patently anti-scientific grievance-based social "science" is still in the rage, even in the highest institutions. (Although the fact that George Bush managed to graduate from Yale puts a lie to the supposed high standards of this institution...) This does not bode well for the future as often these questionable "studies" form the basis of policies and provide an endless supply of angry, radicalized upper-middle class crowd, which, when they get into a position of power (which they do due to their privilege of having connections), they will go full into activism mode. We have seen this at Disney (crashing and burning popular franchises), but even (perhaps) in the banking sector. (Obviously a collapse this magnitude is not going to be a single-cause one, but it would not be surprising if we learned that the leaders were happily doing their little activism projects while their ship was sinking -due to their poor, activism-driven decisions...) I am very interested (well, desperate really) to see this sort of activism sweeping into the fields of "hard" sciences (which it already has begun), because when engineers, scientists and doctors are not chosen based on merit, you will have a catastrophe at your hands - as we have seen with ideologically-driven experiments, like Communism, Nazism, and so on and so forth. And you can't make a logical argument against identity-politics deciding who should become, say, a neurosurgeon. After all, you can't argue that it is fine to have crappy writers, politicians, economists, businessperson, etc. chosen based on their identity (the whole equity, diversity and inclusion stuff) but you can't have it with professions where it actually matters... It either matters everywhere or nowhere. So enjoy your diversity hire engineer designing the airplane you are sitting on. It seems like the inmates are taking over the asylum. 

So that is one big problem. The second issue is that these hacks completely discredit sciences. I know it is just social sciences, not hard sciences, but these obvious distortions coming from academia will tarnish every other fields of science -immunology and climatology included- giving fodder to the other group anti-intellectuals on the Right. (Because make no mistake: identity politics is by definition anti-intellectual.)

The third: if you want to help these very rich, powerful women, who find that there are very few richer and more powerful men for them to date, well, perhaps, you should not engage in misguided finger-pointing... Not surprisingly these powerful men tend to date  younger women (as in the case of DiCaprio, many of them sequentially), without a financial risk to the fruits of their hard work. It certainly makes you feel better about yourself, and you can imagine yourself as fighting the good fight (because actually fighting the good fight, for example for the women of Africa, the Middle East and the rest, would be hard), but it will not help those women you profess to be wanting to help. It will make them even more miserable.

So for the love of god, please stop lying. And do not tarnish sciences like this. 

Gwen Stefani and the contradictions of "the Woke"

  So Gwen Stefani said she felt she was Japanese.

Well, weird, but good for her. She feels close to Japanese culture, cudos and all. (I have a strong feeling she does not actually think she is an actual Japanese; she probably meant she feels closest to Japanese culture.)

But this landed her in some serious hot water, too, because apparently your cultural and genetic traits do not allow you to do so. Simply put if you do not have Japanese ancestry, you cannot declare yourself to be one. Cultural appropriation, privileged white woman and whatnot. Fair enough, I guess; you are what you are born to be. It is a bit too strict even for conservatives, but whatever. (Does it mean, for example, that a Chinese person cannot feel himself or herself to be English?)

Yet. Yet, if someone declares himself to be a woman (or herself a man), apparently it is fine. More than fine, it should be celebrated. Even though someone who is genetically a man declaring himself to be a woman did not experience of all the injustices and whatnot that women have to face in this patriarchal, racist society of ours (not to mention genetics, you know).

So which one is it going to be? I still do not understand the selective application of these lofty ideals, but Stefani's case highlights them pretty well. 

Who gets to play what

  Well, this is about actors. It seems that lately even the supposedly smart and wholesome actors fell victim of this trend of wanting only people from a particular identity group play characters who belong to that particular identity group. Tom Hanks said he would not do Philadelphia (but taking this line of thinking further, surely only a HIV positive gay actor would be eligible to play, no?), there were issues of non-Jewish actresses playing Jewish characters, and so on and so forth. In the same time, of course, we have the constant gender and race swapping, which is apparently fine with the very same people. More on that later. 

But what about Spanish actors? Is Banderas forgiven for playing a Mexican guitar player, or is he considered to be white? Where do the lines lie exactly? Can someone, who is bisexual, play a gay character? Can a gender fluid person play a gay character? Isn't the point of being an actor is to, you know, act? I saw a video of Luke Evans saying how proud he is about playing a straight character convincingly. I mean, yeah -this is your job, isn't it? It should not be such a big issue... I do not recall Arnold being proud to play a cyborg, or Benedict Cumberbatch being proud to play a dragon after all. (And the last I checked, he was NOT an actual dragon, either.)

The scary thing about this is that if you just give it one second to think about this idea, it leads to really, really weird (and stupid) places.

So if only gay people can play gay people, if only Jewish people can play Jewish people, and so on and so forth, that means you are forcing everyone into an ever decreasing box. That also means they cannot play any other characters. That means that Jewish people cannot play non-Jewish characters, and like it or not, there are more gay actors, than gay characters on screen -which means they would have severely limited opportunities if you apply this "rule". This only would only benefit those evil white actors who, being the "vanilla favor", could play almost any other character not falling into one of your pet categories. So identity politics -as usual- kind of shoots itself in the foot.

But what really scares me, is the fact that stupidity, like this, is being pushed by people in "high culture". It is being talked about in NYT, WaPo, whatever, as if it was a worthy ideal to live up to. It is one of those "the emperor is naked" cases, and if people can pretend that the simple and obvious flaws do not exist... well, what else are they pretending about? And even scarier yet: do they actually believe this? Is our "intellectual elite" really that limited intellectually? Are they really this stupid?

Rules for thee and not for me - the curious case of casting

  I have two contrasting cases for your consideration.

Exhibit A: Hungarian Opera dares to play Porgy and Bess with an all white cast. HOW DARE THEY DEFY THE AUTHORS' WISHES

Exibit B: A Becket play gets cancelled because the director did not want to defy the author's wishes, and auditioned for an all-male cast. (In an all-male play, but whatever.)

This kind of makes you think, doesn't it? What makes it OK in one case not to respect what the author wanted, but in the same time absolutely not accept when others choose to ignore these wishes in another case?

To make it a bit more interesting: how is an opera house of a Central European country supposed to show Porgy and Bess when the number of black people in the country -not opera singers, simply black people- would probably be just enough to fill up the cast, but even that is not a given? Hm? Are they to be denied of this opera because it is not America? Should they import black singers and teach them Hungarian? Who pays for the differences in wages? (And how would this go down with Trade Unions? And what about the whole progressive sensitivity of importing overpaid, privileged workforce to push out the indigenous, cheap labor? Isn't that a big no-no?) Why is it a problem that they adopted it to "modern audiences"? (It is about refugees in an unnamed country, not blacks in the US.) If it is, why it was NOT a problem when well-established stories are adopted (or rather abused) in a similar way?

And also: should we cancel all Vagina Monologues plays where men are excluded from the casting?

Confusing questions, aren't they, in these confusing times ruled by identity politics?

Or perhaps just a demonstration about how utterly stupid and idiotic the whole ideology is.

Poor neurobiologists... they can't catch a break

 So these poor souls can't do right by anyone. 

If they claim there are gender-based differences in the brain, they are called sexists and worse. Heck, there is even a name for them: NEUROSEXISM! Don't believe me? Read Nature's glowing review of the Genderd Brain, a book, that shatters old, sexist, outdated stereotypes! All hail this final blow to the Patriarchy! (Except... well, maybe the science does not actually say that, and it is quite worrysome that Nature gets into the social activism game ignoring the papers it (and other papers) regularly publish in the topic... but that is a different conversation.)

So now saying that there may be gendered differences in the human brain will unleash the Social Justice Warriors, who will do their best to get you silenced or even get you fired.

OK, so you accept that our brains are uniform- there are no gendered differences. At the present the leading feminist standpoint is that women are the same as men, and all differences between women and men are the products of our society (you know: da patriarchy). This means it is true in neuroscience, too, as we have seen. As a researcher you really, really do not want to lose your position at your research institute, you do not wish to be the target of a Twitter mob, and you do want to get funded, so you obligingly stand in the line, and work from this angle, or just do your best to avoid this issue altogether, and ignore the topics that would shed light on the basics of these differences which do seem to exist between men and women. (Long story- read the link above.) A question: is it good for science (and humanity) when there are forbidden areas where scientific inquiry dares not to go?

And then comes the other side of Social Justice. Activists who claim you deliberately ignore the differences in the brain because you hate women, and you are a sexist pig serving the Patriarchy, and who will, eventually, again, unleash the very same Social Justice Warriors to write outraged articles about you. There really is no good choice here. It is the Schrödinger's Patriarchy. It oppresses women by claiming they are different from men and simultaneously oppresses women by claiming they are the same as men.

Obviously, for humanity's sake, you should accept what science tells you, and factor this into your medical treatments, policymaking, etc. However when simply saying that women are, well, different, and not just "menstruating people" will earn you death threats, when simply saying that women are different from men will literally unleash hell on you and your family, well, it is a difficult choice, isn't it? The pressure to ignore the differences is not exactly conductive in helping shedding the old habits of only using male animals and men in your studies. Perhaps Dr Liisa Galea should direct her attention to those pesky feminists, too, because I suspect they are the ones needing to be convinced -perhaps starting with Dr Hyde and Dr Halpern. (Who at least argue that there are differences, however negligible -without actually supporting this hypothesis.) 

 The fact remains: there are contradicting demands on science: on one hand it should not acknowledge the statistical differences between male and female brains, on the other it definitely should take them into consideration and include them in the design of preclinical and clinical experiments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But what do I know. Facts are not objective, as we know. Identity politics over everything.

Fuck, just reading this makes me wonder where we put our collective common sense. The saying about the truth being a revolutionary act in dictatorships seems to work in our age of wokeness, too.

Let's blame the whistleblowers, shall we?

 So there were several instances when the obvious bias of certain media outlets, or even whole "scientific fields" (I am not sure how gender studies constitute as science, but whatever) have been revealed by people who submitted fake articles and got published.

The Independent has published an outrageously, obviously over the top article about comedy and free speech (rather a call to curtail it). Got published, no problem. This is very important as it exposed how certain (if not all) media outlets do nothing but pushing agendas. When it was realized it was a hoax, people were outraged at the perpetrators -rather than actually at the obviously biased media outlet. No hard questions about how this may or may not be an endemic issue with all media printed or otherwise. Nothing to see here. After all, it is not as if it is something important, right? We only get our news from them, after all, they only shape our reality.

Same with the Grievance Studies affair- the authors managed to publish a whole chapter of Mein Kampf as a feminist manifesto, they argued for chaining white students, and talked about rape culture in dog parks -and were enthusiastically welcomed by the academic publishers. They passed through peer review, and it seems like social sciences embraced these articles wholeheartedly.

When it became clear these were fake articles, again, the outrage was not directed at the publishers (and the academics who peer-reviewed them), there were no hard questions ask how these academic fields can be biased to this cartoonish level where the Mein Kampf is actually publishable -no, the outrage was directed against these horrible hoaxers.

To this day there are no consequences of these events. None at all. The people who are responsible for these hoaxes are trying to push a conversation about them, they do appear on programs, podcasts and whatnot, but these are very much isolated from the "mainstream". The mainstream media, the mainstream conversation resolutely ignores them. If anything they only blame them for exposing this agenda-driven "science" to the whole world, giving ammunition for right-wingers, climate change deniers and so on to question the integrity and validity of science (as the above linked Atlantic article does, too). So to recap: it is not an issue if you pervert science. It is only an issue when you publicise it.

And this, again, is ignored completely. 

 

'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'

 So apparently a psychiatrist can give a lecture in one of the best universities of the world delivering extremely racist statements without having been shut down five minutes after starting. Or being arrested for inciting violence. Or being pilloried by the whole world, mentioned in every major media outlet how a deplorable racist could air her views in an Ivy Leauge university.

I bet if she was talking about unloading a revolver into the head of any Jew that got in her way, or maybe any black person that got in her way, the outrage would have been much, much bigger. But she only wanted to kill white people (I guess Jews, too, if it matters), so that is OK. I am not a legal expert, but I am not sure talking about how someone wants to kill everyone from a certain background even fits the definition of "free speech".

You can listen to the recording here (because Yale is trying to distance itself from this thing now it became public).

Obviously she is not going to act on these feelings -as she herself stated. But will she be held responsible if someone does? The woke machine is great at stroking resentment and anger against whites (and men); I am not sure it is a wise thing to add fuel to the fire to "evoke emotion". Is this an excuse for these statements, anyway? If I say I am not going to act on my feeling, can I, too, say the most racist shit I can think of with impunity? 

Interestingly (not) the kind lady's message was listened to with a sympathetic ear by the WaPo; of course it was meant some other way than what it actually meant. Telling people to pointless to talk to them obviously conveys the message that it is not pointless to talk to them. And talking about killing them because of their skin color is is such a great conversation starter. Or maybe, just maybe, Khilanani was trying to do some damage control; the question is why WaPo is giving her a platform to do so? Would they do the same for a white supremacist? (Not that I think they should, but my point is: neither should they give one to her...)

Another, interesting question, is why she made these statements in the first place? Listening to the non-official recording, it did not seem like an attempt on sparking a constructive conversation. It seemed like a rant from a racist who completely lost her marbles. So maybe it is what actually happened: we reached peak-woke now. She honestly thought that after the whole White Fragility, antiracism training, critical race theory and other successes of the woke movement she is truly free to speak her mind without facing repercussions. Apparently while #killallwhitemen was acceptable, her version of genocide based on pigmentation is not, even if it is only directed against white people (maybe she should have only talked about white men). Who knew. 

But it is still quite chilling that someone in Yale (and not some third rate community college) was given a platform to spew her hatred, and nobody from the major media outlets, from the political establishment (you know the people who decide what gets known and what does not)  really cares. The world depicted in the media and the actual, real world have very little in common.

Wargaming and misogynistic attitudes according to Wired

 So I read this article about how horrible men are to those few women who dare to play tabletop wargames, even though they would flock to the hobby if they were allowed to.

Upon reading the article you can't help but realize how utterly ridiculous this whole victimhood-search has become.

First of all: are there total assholes in wargaming? Well, there are total assholes everywhere, so that is a given. However, is it fair to generalize the whole hobby based on two or three jerks? 

I guess the answer is yes. I will keep that in mind the next time some fuckwit kills a lot of people in name of Islam. 

Apart from this interesting idea, the examples the poor female wargamers bring up are not exactly cases of gatekeeping and misorgynistic attitudes, as they claim them to be.

Have you been to tabletop wargaming events? No? Well, allow me. Imagine a place with huge tables filled with tiny little plastic soldiers and monsters, terrain, weird dices and whatnot. The attendants are 99.99% male, mostly white, usually socially awkward (you know the people you normally bully in high school because they are total nerds). Some have questionable personal hygene. What connects them is the love of the game and the lore -they are extremely passionate about minor issues; imagine how papal councils must have been in the Middle Ages trying to decide if Peter sat right next to Jesus or two seats away during the Last Supper (and burn the losers of the debate at stake), and you have an idea about the dedication here.

The few females you see are usually spouses or mothers who were dragged there without their consent, and are forced to endure this whole experience. There are very, very few women who are actually interested in playing and painting these stupid little minis; and I am quite sure the reason is not because men don't let women play with little toy soldiers. The stereotype of the husband trying to hide how much he spent on his latest Raptor squad is there for a reason. Also: if you want to make sure that that troublesome sexy girl who keeps hitting on you leaves you alone, you just tell her you play Warhammer. It is the perfect female-repellent. Works better than sandals with socks.

Anyhow, do you see why people would not assume immediately that a member of the fairer sex would actually like to play the game or know anything about it? It is not because they won't allow women to play. It is because in their experience no women would want to play the game. In fact, if you tell them, that you are a woman and you have a 2000 point Blood Angels army (painted), I am sure you will get so many unsolicited marriage proposals, you won't know what to do with them.

You see, people will stereotype because this is what we do. It helps everyday life; it is a survival mechanism that is older than our species. It is not sexism and it is not racism. And it is not just those evil wargamers. Do try to bring your child as a male to a playground, and see where you get. If you survive with some well-meant but quite insulting pieces of advice about how to do this whole parenting-thing, you can count yourself lucky. They might even call the cops on you because, having a penis means you might be a creep or worse. (But that, of course, is not sexism. Of course.)

Or do this in any femaled dominated profession/hobby. Go there as a male and see how women react to you. You are not the regular demography for that particular setting, so people will struggle to place you. And not because they hate men, either. Creating a story about this non-story to depict how evil and racist certain groups of people are (who are inevitably white and male in these stories) is just bad journalism. (They pulled the same thing with gamers and Star Wars fans, too.)

Shame on you Luke, and shame on you, Wired.

When negative stereotypes are OK

 This has really been bothering me for a while. You keep reading how stereotypes are bad (even good ones), now D&D has done the right thing (depending on your point of view) and removed negative race ability score modifiers  (whatever they might be -but what is important to be more inclusive and not to hurt our Orc and  goblin player's feelings)…

But every time you read an article about abuse -physical or mental- it is almost guaranteed the photos will show a female victim and a male abuser.

Just do a search:

This article has links to further articles which all show female victims, and if shown, male perpetrators. IKEA? But of course!

The Guardian is  obviously following this trend -how could they not? Psychology Today?  Of course Always… 

Foundations? Obviously

There was one exception I found in this non-representative search. One.

This article does not even try… it flat out uses the male pronoun.

Why is this a problem? Well, apart from the usual "stereotyping hurts, it is bad, you should not do it" any time it comes up with anyone who is not white and male (but any time you complain when it is about white males, you get the "you are such a snowflake" comments), it does help pushing a false narrative of male perpetrators and female victims. (Even when it is about male victims, it is somehow the Patriarchy's fault...) This has real-world consequences on how society relates to male victims (or men accused of being perpetrators) - as it was  many times discussed even on these pages. 

But apparently this does not really ring the alarm bells the same way as stereotyping Orcs or Sand People does.