So, does skin color matter or not?

 Well, there has been a constant uproar about gender and raceswaps in popular franchises -understandably so.

The response to this is always "diversity" and "representation" as if it was not the laziest, stupidest way to represent "people of color" -an easy way to pander and cause controversy which is supposed to drive interest in your product. (Aka "fan baiting").

The response is usually also: well, it is a fictional character, so what are you so upset about. (So we do not do it to historical ones? Sure about that?) Or: this was the perfect person for the role. Or: we need more representation.

(It is a long topic to discuss, but a short version - fans tend to like the stuff they like the way it is. They do not want their expectations subverted, and so on and so forth.)

The easiest response to this is obviously then, well, what about a white Black Panther? Or a white Spawn? So far I got not response to this. Usually the comeback is an accusation of racism. (For the record: I dislike the raceswaps in Ghost in a Shell, and other movies, where the characters were switched to white, but apparently that does not count.) Regardless the fall-back argument is that you should not be arguing about the skin color of a made-up character. So any non-historical character is free game to change -and only a racist would complain. OK, gotcha. (Talking about racism... there is plenty of that going around, but somehow it is normalized. Imagine a white guy saying he is not watching something because the main character is female or non-white... but I digress.)

Back to our topic: we can mention historical characters, too, who underwent raceswaps: Queen Charlotte, Anne Boylen, kinda Vikings, and now Queen Cleopatra. (And while we are at falsifying history, let's talk about the Woman King...)

So can we change those, too, or not? Can now we have finally Daniel Craig play Malcom X? 

Apparently the rule now is that any character can be switched to any race or gender, right?

Gotcha.

Enter Milo and Stitch. Read the linked article (and about the whole idiotic uproar). A bona fide Hawaiian actress is not brown enough for these people. I repeat: she is actually native to Hawaii. Her only sin is that she is too white. And NOW it is unacceptable to do a "raceswap". Which, I repeat, is NOT a raceswap. 

The mind boggles. I guess now we can come with the whole "relax, it is a fictional character, she could be a male and played by Dolph Lundgren, you are racist for making it an issue and so on and so forth".

The sheer idiocy and lack of self-awareness of these people is astonishing. 

Star Wars and racism

Well, look at the reactions to an obviously not white guy cosplaying Luke Skywalker.

Why it is important is two-fold.

1. You do not need exact representation for people to see themselves in a character. It is not to say that you should only have white men playing every single role from babies to grannies, but the current forced diversity is patently idiotic and stupid. (Not to mention divisive and counterproductive, but whatever.)

2. Star Wars fans, by large, are NOT racist or sexist. The criticism Rey, Reeva, Rose, and the rest of the newer characters get is not due to racism or sexism. That is not to say a little vocal minority does not have issues -they are shit people, and there are shit people everywhere. Ewan McGregor's rant in a car got that right -although the problem with these virtue signaling messages is that they address a truly small group of people, giving them more prominence than they actually deserve. Oooor -they are used to deflect any and all blame from a shit show and a shit character with accusing anyone who dares to criticize them as racist and sexist trolls. This is part of a well-known strategy you could see in the all-female Ghostbusters, Rings of Power, Star Wars, etc. called fan baiting. 

So, are Star Wars fans, by large, racist and sexist? 

Dunno, let's take a look.

Was Yar Yar Binks was reviled (and poor Ahmed West hated) because the actor was black or because Yar Yar was a terrible character? He did get personal attacks by those already mentioned assholes which are unacceptable -but the fandom also stood behind him and was happy for him in his return role en masse. Did people dislike Reeva's character because she was a black woman, or because it was a shit character?  How were other actors of color treated? Did Pedro Pascal, Billy Dee Williams, Samuel L. Jackson, Forest Whitaker, Carl Weathers, Ming-Na Wen, Temuera Morrison, Gina Carano, Titus Welliver, Michael Lang, Rosario Dawson, John Boyega, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Giancarlo Esposito, etc. etc. needed special treatment from Disney warning them of those horrible, racist, toxic fans like Moses did? 

I guess not. Do they get massive hate on social media by those toxic fans? I guess not.

By the way, why wasn't the criticism of the Book of Boba Fett met with accusations of anti-Maori and anti-Asian racism and sexism? It does not work as well as with black actors, eh? Or maybe it was so bad even they could not bring themselves to do it... Oh, and maybe it is not the fans who are racist, but Disney itself... (Weird turn of events, ain't it?)

So what is it, dear Disney? You know, to keep a franchise alive, it is not enough to bring a crowd into the movie theater. "Casuals" will watch your show, then forget about it, and get to the next Avatar or whatever that comes after. You actually need fans. Fans that you are actively pissing off and alienating in order to please a non-existent mass of potential fans who express their opinions on Twitter quite loudly, but who are actually a minority (just like those racist assholes you use to taint the whole of fandom). They will not bring in revenue for you. They will not buy your Rose action figures, your spinoff books, your computer games, they will not subscribe to your streaming service for your shows. They will wreck this franchise and move onto the next one to destroy.

And one more thing: Star Wars was always inclusive. In fact Star Wars was always the refuge of the outcasts, who were not cool enough for the cool kids, so any and all were invited. Now you are alienating the people who buy your merchandise, your books, your DVD special editions, and the rest -and this will kill your franchise.  

The Force is Female

 So Kennedy is doubling down on the whole direction Star Wars is taking.

The problem is not that there are girls playing with our toys -Star Wars has always been inclusive, no matter what certain media organizations claim. Reeva, Rey, Rose, that purple-haired admiral, and the rest were not reviled because they were women and or black. There were plenty of women and non-white characters before and since who were absolutely adored by the very same toxic fans who hate the second-hand Inquisitor, Ms Mary Sue Skywalker and the rest. It has been talked about why the sequel trilogies were horrible, why the new series are trash (with the exception of the Mandalorian, which is mediocre, but enjoyable - although...) so that is not the point here.

The point is that falling profits from movie tickets, from merchandise, from theme parks matter not - they are pushing the same idiotic strategy to make sure Star Wars die completely. (Well, Mando, which was "the" successful show so far, is turning into a Bo-Katan show now, too, and viewership is falling...) 

Not sure what is going on, honestly. As with many things it seems like the inmates took over the asylum. The people who make decisions are absolutely distanced from the real world, they seem to have no idea about the franchise they are leading, and they do not seem to care about profits. There were so many squandered opportunities to create truly great shows, movies, whatever -and they conscientiously thrown everything into the gutter, and went with the "strong female character takes over from the incompetent original male character". Guess what. People do not like their beloved characters deconstructed, dragged into the mud so that new ones can "take over" without actually earning their place. We saw a Han Solo that reverted to his old scheningans becoming a deadbeat father, a failure in all fronts. Luke Skywalker became cynical pessimist who is ready to kill the son of his sister and his best friend because he had a bad dream, and then goes off sulking alone. (Don't worry, Rey will create that Jedi Academy for you, old man.) And so on and so forth. For some reason people do not like this, do not buy the tickets, the merchandise. Yes, a wider audience will go to the movies -but franchises are not sustained by casual viewers. They are sustained by those people Disney reviles -the fans.

This is truly puzzling because so far it seemed like these high level decision makers are perfectly fine with corrupting anything in the name of profit. But now they behave like full-blown activists - very much like the revolutionaries of old in the USSR and China who were full of great ideas and disregard of how the real world actually works. The results are usually catastrophic - in this case it merely leads to the death of a franchise and the lay-off of seven thousand (!) people. Obviously this number does not include those who are responsible for steering the ship into the rocks. Those people will not be fired; they will get a cushy bonus, and maybe a golden parachute, so they can try their hands on ruining another franchise in a different company.

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. 

No, Madonna, not everything is sexism and ageism

 So, apparently, when Madonna showed up looking like a nightmare from a horror movie, the criticism and mockery is obviously sexism and ageism.

It did not occur to her (well...) that maybe it is only directed at her, her person, and the choices she made about her face. No, obviously not. It was directed at all women by a Patriarchal system hell-bent on oppressing her. Of course.

I guess all the criticism of Leo's questionable choice of dating partners is also sexism and ageism, right? Right?

Let's be real: Madonna is trying to deflect any criticism by claiming it to be sexism. Apparently any and all criticism of a woman is sexism, any and all criticism of a person of color is racism -there cannot be other explanation. (Funnily it does not work the other way around...) 

It is the same as labelling all critics of certain movies racists and sexist pigs instead of, you know, accepting that the result is shit. (It is part of the fan baiting strategy by the way, and Disney, Marvel and Amazon Studios are very keen on it.) It may seem work to some extent, but only as long as the "high culture" (journalists, opinion makers, etc.) accepts it as fact. The problem is that it is increasingly clear for everyone else, who has no vested interest in taking part in this collective delusion,  that the emperor has no clothes. All it does is causing further divide between the "elite" and the "masses" - something an unscrupulous individual, like Trump, took advantage of. It does not work. You only lose credibility if you do it. 

Why be very careful when you are trying to address the "gender pay gap"

 So, it has been established that the Gender Pay Gap is not a result of some evil male-conspiracy to pay women less for the same amount of work, but mostly the result of lifestyle choices: women -in general- realizing they want families once they reach a certain age, and want to spend more time with their families, rather than spending 70+ hours at work.

Regardless, many activists, journalists, and people with bullhorns want to redress this situation in a way to "elevate" these women in the expense of those evil men who make more money.

There is one problem with this viewpoint: it looks at individuals rather than family units. Because if one partner has a lowered income due to childcare duties, you know what happens? The other will try to make up for this shortfall. He will put in more work. He will fight harder to progress his career and increase his earning potential. He will spend more time at work (which ironically means he will have less time to chip in around the house.) So if you somehow make it more difficult for men to earn money (or favor women in general with diversity quotas and other methods in hiring), you will make life really, really difficult for those women who are at home tending the children.

Now I understand that for a feminist this is no way for a woman to live (we only respect choices if they are the right choice), however, it is still the result. You make families (and hence women) worse off. Which is a textbook case of unintended consequences of poorly though-out policies. Trust me, these things end horribly almost always; I came from an ex-communist country - I should know.

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.