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.

Star Wars and the hierarchy of victimhood

 Well, identity politics is an insane ideology. On face value, if you do not think about it much, it may make a tiny bit of sense for "oppressed" groups, but if you really, really, really think about it it really quickly becomes clear how stupid and how dangerous the whole thing really is. And I do mean dangerous. Just because you are not an Aryan German in the '30s defining yourself and those dastardly Jews based on their group identity and not as individuals, it does not mean it is not the same idea. Only you approach it from the "victims' " side, not the perpetrators' - and you are free to define who the victim is. As long as you keep in mind who is not a victim: white males. Perhaps just white people in general, and sometimes it could be just males in general, even though that would include males who happen to belong to a victim group otherwise.

But it gets confusing really fast because it leads to a weird hierarchy of victimhood where you need to weight different victim groups against each other to determine who the victim is in any particular case where there are no white males to blame, which is made even more confusing considering the issue that a person can belong to several different victim groups at the same time. After all, how do you judge the group of black males against white females, for example? Does having black skin outweight having a vagina in this victimhood olympics? How about black bisexual males vs black transgender females? How about a disabled gay white male vs a lesbian Asian female? Do you count Jews as white or as a minority? What about Caribbean blacks and African blacks in the UK?

See: the sequel trilogies of Star Wars.

It has become clear very early that Disney approached the whole trilogy not from the side of telling a good Star Wars story, but from the perspective of social justice, more importantly, feminist social justice.

From the ridiculously Mary Sue female lead(s), the "The Force is female" stupidity, the disregard of extended lore, the emasculation and killing off important and beloved characters, the weak writing, to the vilification of the fanbase, it was very clear from the start that they were not interested in telling a good story or build the universe. They were interested in pushing an agenda even if it meant the destruction of the franchise. The agenda being some sort of warped version of feminism (4th wave now I believe).

So they pushed and pushed the unrelatable female characters -starting from Rey to that weird purple-haired admiral-, and forced everyone else to the background.

Which ranked some actors who were poised to play a much bigger role based on the first movie that came out. And who also had their victimhood agenda -in case not centered on their gonads, but on their skin color. Enter: John Boyega. 

The poor chap is really, really into how much he is suppressed, and how much he is fighting the good fight. The fact is that he is not the victim of racism. He simply lost the victimhood olympics. Apparently in this case his skin color was not enough to elevate him into a victim status - he merely became "just another male" in the trilogy, pushed aside to give way to the female heroes. And no, it is not because Disney is racist (they might be, who knows), it is because they were doing the feminist thing in identity politics, and kinda forgot about the race stuff. Sorry buddy, having a vagina trumps your skin color. Try again next time, will you?

But this is the issue with this whole exercise... you can't include all victim groups. You can never achieve inclusivity, and it means you will by definition exclude certain groups, meaning you are going to be the very evil you fight against if you believe in this nonsense. It is literally impossible to cram every single downtrodden identity groups into a 2 hour movie (it might be possible to do in a TV series, though -they are trying their utmost with Star Trek Discovery and Picard), and even if you try, it will be like trying to shovel sand in the desert: as you get more and more groups, they will fragment into further groups, and you will never be able to include them all. You included females? Great- now include black females you racist. Black females are included? How about Asian? South-East Asian? Non-able? Inuit? Aboriginal? Lesbian? Bisexual? Pansexual? And the list goes on. You can't include all female groups to begin with, let alone all groups you take to be victims. Which will make the members of those groups really angry at you, and you will be probably scratching your head like Katherine Kennedy is probably currently doing about what you did wrong. She made one mistake: she thought the only victim group is the female one, and forgot about the others. If you play this game you can only lose -even if you try your best to be the most socially justicest (I know it is not a word) warrior. Which makes it a delicious irony to see all the accusations they levelled at the "toxic fandom" come back at them.

Equal pay, entitlement and women's soccer team -how our reality is manufactured by the media

So the news have been full of how unfairly the US' women's soccer team is treated by the Patriarchy. The poor souls get paid less than the males! How horrible, right? Sue the fuckers responsible!

And they did.

And the lawsuit was promtly dismissed by the judge.

The reasons were simple: the women actually made more than the men did. Had the situaton of the two teams been reversed, the men would have received less money than the women. Initially they were offered the same contract as the men, which they rejected in favor of a different contract, and now they realized that if they had taken the original contract they would have made even more with their present success, so now they want the original contract retroactively.

Which seems to me less than a fight against the Patriarchy, and more a case of greed. Which is fine, because you can be as a greedy motherfucker as you want to be, it is a free country after all.

However, wrapping your greed into the flags of Social Justice to press your case, well, is not cool, to say the least. It does not just make you greedy, it makes you an asshole.

And here comes the actual point of this post: the media manufactures our reality. This really is a clear-cut case. And yet, the most prominent media outlets, Biden, everyone are still pushing the social justice angle, going into tortorous arguments about how it is a clear violation of the law, even while the women did make more money than the men would have, using this case as a clear demonstration of the existence of the Gender Pay Gap. Which it isn't. But reality is defined not by facts, but by narratives, so there you go. 

Either people who are supposed to be our betters really are so simple they cannot understand this concept as they are blinded by their ideology -or they are so cynical they decided not to understand why the lawsuit was dismissed. Either way the prospects are scary. It matters not what the truth is -what matters is that you use your bullhorn to shape it to your liking. And this is scary because what started out as a fringe social studies experiment now is used to shape government policy and our culture. The most powerful person in the world (Biden, presently), should not be standing there spouting nonsense. He, of all people, should really, really make sure he has all the facts on the ground available.

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. 

 

You are trying too hard - Aliens and colonial oppression

 OK, so apple pie is racist. Right. I find this whole argument a bit on the far too much side, but then I've read this one about the story of the Aliens from the aliens' perspective and realized that the apple pie article is reasonably sane compared to this.

Obviously we have to reinterpret everything from the bad guy's perspective. I mean it can be a fun thing to do: the Last Ringbearer was kind of good, and after reading much Warhammer 40K I did realize the Empire in Star Wars was a positive force in the universe. All good, it is always interesting to see things from other viewpoints.

However, the author of this article really went off the deep end when he is trying to push his agenda of critical race theory through Aliens.

Some quotes:

'They find an alien spaceship with a cache of alien eggs. In the spirit of rapacious colonizers past, they try to salvage one of the aliens for biological experimentation, but the infant bravely fights back, killing all of the crew except Ripley.'

'And the aliens repeatedly sacrifice themselves to damage the invaders, spraying their acid blood on their attackers in a final, gallant act of defiance.'

' The alien mother manages to climb aboard the escaping human spacecraft, and, enraged at the wanton murder of her children, tries to take revenge. But even that is denied her. Ripley shoots her out the airlock into space. The entire alien encampment is wiped out, just as American soldiers wiped out the Vietnam village of My Lai in 1968.' (Emphasis by me.)

And this is where it becomes just a parody of itself and the whole critical race theory it is trying to push. A really bad one at that. Making comparisons between the aliens in this setting and the mass murder in My Lai... well, that is not just poor taste. That is literally spitting on the graves of those who were murdered by American soldiers. And this trash is being published online.

Astonishing. People have lost their ability to think. Both the author of this piece of crap and the editors who gave it the go-ahead.