Why is identity politics (woke) will eat itself

 

As Lizzo's case shows, it is usually true that the "higher they are the longer they fall".  It does seem like that people who are so keen on the victim Olympics, and claim the status of the poor and downtrodden aggressively, also not very nice people when they are in the position of power. Who knew. It is also quite chilling that people can now be arrested for Tweets in certain parts of the world. There are also fundamental problems with the woke as the ideology seeped into institutions, politics, and culture.

But there is a core issue with the progressive mindset, and the progressive ideology that is going to bring it down for sure.

 

 

Just look at feminists. (Currently at the fourth wave as they are.) They played the identity politics card as hard as they could, and they succeeded. (Anyone seriously arguing that women are oppressed in Western countries is a deluded moron.)

However, this does not stop. First, they need to keep the ball rolling, because many people built their careers on this -so new groups are needed to fight for. And suddenly the "old school", hard-core feminists found themselves in the place of the evil white men they fought- the reactionary TERF, who is oppressing poor trans people. The tactics, the language is the same, but the sides have changed. Heck, their efforts to have the "women are identical to men in every way" idea entrenched only helped trans activists who took this concept and made it their own. (Weirdly now feminists, like Kathleen Stock, are demanding that men to raise their voices, even though they were quite insistent that they shut the f... heck up and stand in line, until now... but that is a different matter.)

All of which is ironic. And this will keep going on and on as the groups to be fought for are getting more and more fractured. But this also means that the "mainstream" will have to accept weirder and weirder things, and at some point the dichotomy between reality and ideology will break the system. People could accept "gender pay gap" as a fact even though the way it was calculated is completely bonkers, and even a first grader should see the problem with it. They can ignore domestic violence statistics, etc., etc... Then came the whole issue of who we support -Islam or women- in Europe during 2015 (Islam won - apparently the issues with women's rights in Islamic -and to be fair, other non-European- cultures are non-issues, and mentioning them is Islamphobic). But now the whole "what is a woman" thing is breaking things apart. This is something you average person will not ignore, even though you are trying to muddy the waters with the differences between sex and gender. And this process will continue since the woke have only one way to go -forward. They need to double down or else. Which, eventually, will mean that the whole ideology will crash and burn. You can kinda see signs of it with the whole MAP thing... You can't possibly normalize that with most of humanity as most people have children. It is an interesting topic to explore, but somehow the lines are much, much more blurred than activists declare them to be.

This is not a bad thing -the only problem is that they can do enormous damage until then. For one, enactment of misplaced, sexist and racist policies, destroyed individuals and the rest - but the strengthening of the far Right is also a big issue they carry the responsibility for.

 

So the Witcher showrunner is doing some damage control.

Two things:

1. there is nothing debunked -only some generic phrases that corporate usually uses whenever the shit hit the fan and they wish to deny it. OK, I guess, you are free to claim you respect the source material, when you clearly not (seriously? Yen trying to murder Ciri?), and you essentially chase away your nerd star (and then try to smear him anonymously).

 

This is all well and good - nothing else is expected from the likes of these people.

However, note the last lines...

Several parts of the text in this article, including the title, were generated with the help of an AI tool.

 

Well.  The article actually reads better, it is more coherent than most of similar "articles" published by actual humans. You know the ones I am talking about: that look like as if they were cut and pasted from several other articles, senselessly repeating things, not really having a focus. Apparently AI does write better articles (and looking at TV shows and movies, those, too) than most of these online "journalists". Which ties neatly into my previous post's point: apparently our "betters" are not only not better than us, but actually complete morons. God save us.

The p-hacking of female hunters -the curious case of selective generalization

 This has been one of the issues that bugged me to the max.

Lord of the Rings, Witcher, Kingdom Come Deliverance - stories based on Northern and Central European folklore, history, are obviously racist because they are white. And we all know that Europe was soooo multicultural; heck even the Vikings were not blonde, Nordic warriors. 

And the proof of this very multicultural Medieval Europe, which somehow disappeared, and replaced by an all-white one?

Well, the Vikings travelled a lot, and had some black slaves, apparently. There were a couple of black people visiting Europe even before the Industrial Age. So this absolutely means that your average European village looked like a Starbucks in Beverly Hills when it comes to ethnic composition. (And you are absolutely justified to race-swap not even fictional characters but real ones as well. Obviously.) The arguments for a very multicultural Middle Ages rests on a very strange straw man: namely, there were NO black people in Europe AT ALL. (Also, back then people did not see race. Sure, buddy, nobody noticed the obvious differences.) If you can find just one, well, that means it must have been a very common occurrence. So enter the black Viking Jarls, the racially diverse villages in Central Europe and so on and so forth. By this token, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy also had a very multi-racial army during WWI, since they had him... 

Well, guess what -nobody actually argues for absolute "racial purity". But having a few odd outliers does not mean you are free to claim that black people were just everywhere in Europe during the Middle Ages, and you can't cry racism if they are not present in the media representing this period. Might as well demand that the Franz Joseph to be played by a black man in a movie adaptation now.

Same with women hunters. Never mind that women and men are different. Just look at how the great US women's soccer team fared against boys. Yes, it was funny. No, you can't explain it away. This is a trend that is unbroken -just look at "trans" women competing against actual women.

So they find one female skeleton with a pointy stick, and suddenly - WOMEN HUNTED, TOO. (Weirdly enough this does not work the other way: regardless of having women rulers and whatnot do not mean that DA PATRIARCHY does not exist. After all, the couple of female rules - Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Hatshepsut, Sammuramat, Victoria, Elizabeth, Amina, Tzu-hsi, Maria-Theresa, etc., etc., must mean "Men, move over, women had power, too"... And jokes aside it kinda does.)

Because the conclusion of the original "peer reviewed" article fits with their ideology, the reality behind it -and the flawed methodology- does not matter. Whenever leftist people mock conservatives about their anti-intellectualism, their anti-science stances, when it comes to masks, vaccines and whatnot, this comes to mind. This is straight-out flat-Earth belief, and it is propagated to the highest levels in our culture. Just as the above case, this is a straw man. Nobody claims that gender roles were ever as insanely strict as if we were ants. Well only those people do, who try to argue for teams of women hunting mammoth. 

If this is not dangerous, I am not sure what is. They are corrupting science, and this corrupted, baseless "scientific" literature, which is based on self-selected peer-review is used to influence the "real world".   

On a side-note: I increasingly have the feeling that our institutions were hijacked by well-meaning, intellectually challenged activists who have absolutely no schooling, no concepts of basics of history, biology, no critical thinking skills, just a burning desire to change the world for the better. And it is not just a community college paper in backwater North Dakota we are talking about. It is the NYT, Guardian, politicians, and so on -people who are now steering the boat. And this thought makes me really desperate. I can handle the thought of our intellectual elite to be superior but dishonest. I cannot handle the fact that they are, in fact, stupid as fuck.

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, 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.