That final sentence is another great example of how what would otherwise be attacked as a deranged alt right conspiracy theory – mass immigration means the end of even pop culture like Star Wars – is unimpeachably respectable when stated by the left as if it’s a positive.

cringe

We desperately need a new American mythology…

Well, the current myth runs along the lines of: Black people are holy scientists; women and children are the ones who do hard jobs; trannies are superheros in disguise who will rise up and save us if we just quit hating them; etc.

We desperately need more truth.

An attack on “Star Wars” is an attack on what many adults of George Lucas’s generation were taught as children: that the most important good guys are generally white men, and the biggest threat on earth is a superweapon.

The problem is that nobody agrees anymore on what the good guys look like, nor what this century’s global threat really is.

That’s cute.. but it’s pretty wrong:
a) For the bulk of the 20th century the good guys from a US point of view were _mostly_ white but (with Asian Allies sometimes) the bad-guys were either entirely white (Germans , Russians) or Asian (Japanese, Korean/Chinese, Vietnamese/Chinese).

All the woke racial stuff in the US has to do with … NONE of these people. It’s all about black people, the more native latinos and sometimes Muslims.

b) Star Wars good guys from the original trilogy had white people, Lando Calrissian, a wookie and Yoda as “good guys”. Whereas the bad guys were iirc all white… and Jabba. So from the beginning that show was “multicultural” that way. If looking at the most core group then it was whites vs whites AND more specifically it was a civil war which turned out to be among people from the same family / religion and political system. So in that sense there was no “cultural” dimension to the fight.

“Like a lot of Americans, I have formative memories of my first exposure to George Lucas’s epic tale of space Rebels defeating a planet-destroying Empire. I got so excited as a little kid in 1977 about seeing “Star Wars: A New Hope” that I threw up outside the theater.”

I nearly did the same thing when I saw her profile pic.

Everyone melting down over the updated version of the Carter-era teen lightsaber movie is a change from everyone melting down over the CGI version of the Thatcher-era musical about cats.

Anybody who fails to recognize that Star Wars is just a load of silly soap opera crap dressed up as SciFi is an intergalactic jacktard and should be fed to the Sarlacc.

“We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.”

Yeah, and if temperatures drop due to the ongoing solar minimum, you’re really gonna get “climate change” good and hard. Good luck handling that with your “majority-minority” nation.

Happy Christmas Steve and all at iSteve.

It’s the voice of the half of the US population that no longer lives in a state resembling actual reality.

“a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie

“A number”? Is that number greater than 1? Greater than 10? The 2nd sentence does not follow from the 1st. Even if there were 1 or more Russian trolls denigrating them movie, it does not follow that ONLY Russian trolls were doing this and there were not any fans.

In other words, the article reeks of Clintonian dishonesty with words.

If I were Putin, I would demand an investigation. It’s one thing for State Security to sow divisiveness in American politics – that makes sense. But spending Russian taxpayer money on denigrating American movies? How does this advance the interests of the Russian state?

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

Not only do we need a new one (Wakanda, here we come!) , but we need to retcon the old ones to fit the new mold. George Washington, great grandfather of Denzel, PLANTED a cherry tree. We can digitally alter the old movies to make Princess Leia into an AFRICAN princess. I’m dreaming of BROWN Christmas. Etc.

Totalitarians always confuse mythology with propaganda. Mythology is organic, like cider and bluegrass. Propaganda is a factory made product like Coca-Cola and Astroturf. People can tell the difference. The authors are not asking for a new mythology (this is impossible, like asking for snow on Christmas) – they are issuing instructions to the propaganda mills.

By the way, aren’t they kind of jumping the gun on majority-minority? And if we are really concerned with planet-wide threats like climate change, wouldn’t it be better if these minorities were back home in their low carbon home villages instead of slurping Slurpees in their 82 degree heated Section 8 apartments in Minneapolis?

Is it true that most references in mainstream media to “the same sources that spread misinformation [overwhelmingly obvious criticisms about Hillary Clinton] in the 2016 election” they are simply referencing 4chan, the troll megaboard?

But no one dares speak its name because then more people will find it.

If Russians think a Star Wars movie sucks, it’s not because it sucks but because they are Russians.

If you think a Star Wars movie sucks, it’s Russian mind control.

The Empire did nothing wrong.

DISCLAIMER: My screen name was bestowed upon me in basic training by friends, as my first name is Ben. I figured there were much worse nicknames to have so I didn’t mind. I haven’t seen any Star Wars product since Episode III.

Agree.

And if we are really concerned with planet-wide threats like climate change, wouldn’t it be better if these minorities were back home in their low carbon home villages instead of slurping Slurpees in their 82 degree heated Section 8 apartments in Minneapolis?

I trolled an environmentalist site for awhile; this was not a popular topic.

If they engaged at all, there were roughly two camps:

) give immigrants and minorities whatever they want; we’re just here to trash White people.

) We’re all going to eventually be living in local communities fueled by wind-solar-wood, so let’s concentrate on planning for that.

Enough already! We need a diverse cohort of inclusive multi-cultural heroes to combat the evil Trumpian forces of misogyny, fascism, racism, election theft and sexual orientation ostracism. And climate change. Obviously. Come on Hollywood–you can do this!

Something about the US Coast Guard didn’t prevent overfishing in Somali waters is why they need to live in Minnesota. Or pollution dumping. Anyway, we’re white, and It’s Our Fault.

The three new Star Wars were not good. Allowing Johnson to make the middle one without making him keep to a larger arc was dumb and made #2 really bad, and this new one didn’t fix the problems that introduced—so of course the elites are having their media float ‘races’ because they could never make a mistake.

Sort of like the 2016 Ghostbusters was terrible–not sure why that happened because all the cast members are first rate actresses and one of them is also a great scriptwriter–so of course it could only be because the audience is sexist.

Captain Marvel wasn’t good? The audience is both sexist and races–sexist because the lead is a woman and races because the (wooden) lead defended Oprah’s crappy Wrinkle in Time movie by calling the audience who didn’t like it races.

The author of the piece, Annalee Newitz, wants you to refer to her as “they” and “them” and is in a relationship with a person who is substantially a man dressed as a woman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalee_Newitz

Someone whose personal life is in such tumult doesn’t warrant the benefit of the doubt. Some people who have a rich fantasy life are burdened with schizophrenia, some are just profoundly confused at why things are the way they are.

“Star Wars” became a new national mythos;

If that is true, that may explain these op-eds that seem written by 13-year olds. Star Wars is a dumb film for children/teenagers.

I watched Star Wars as a child and for me it was just a movie. Maybe I was too young; I liked more E.T. and Indiana Jones and Back to the Future which came later. I didn’t care much for the prequels, never watched them, and as for the new trilogy, I just watched the first one, hated it, and knew the others would suck. There was no way to do anything interesting with that kind of material.

Granted that Adam Driver is good as Kylo Ren. Driver is a movie star.

I’m one of the few people who don’t like Adam Driver so much and doesn’t understand why recently he seems to be in all movies. I mean, he’s good as an actor I suppose, but he has a strange face and I don’t like his voice. For me a movie star is someone who has some sort of magnetic presence and you don’t get tired of looking at him/her for two hours. I get why Al Pacino and Audrey Hepburn are stars, Adam Driver, not so much. (You don’t need to be necessarily handsome, but you need to have a certain type of quality). Another one I never liked was Russel Crowe.

Half in the Bag: The 70-Minute Rise of Skywalker Review

Published on Dec 23, 2019
Internet superstar Rich Evans joins Mike and Jay on this very special episode of Half in the Bag. The guys discuss the newest Star Wars film, “The Rise of Skywalker” and attempt to make sense of it in the fairest, most humane way possible.

If the racist attacks are from Russian bots, isn’t that good news? Americans aren’t super racists then? Or at least not as super racist as we thought? So maybe ixnay on some of the worst counter attacks from the legitimate press would be in order just to stop feeding the trolls.

The 50 year old author:

Annalee Newitz in 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalee_Newitz

Annalee Newitz (born 1969) is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. They have written for the periodicals Popular Science and Wired. From 1999 to 2008 they wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000 to 2004 they were the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004 they became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded Other magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015 they were Editor-in-Chief of Gawker-owned media venture io9, and subsequently its direct descendant Gizmodo, Gawker’s design and technology blog. As of 2019, they are a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.

Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz in 2011

Newitz is the child of two English teachers: their mother, Cynthia, at a high school, and their father, Marty, at a community college.[13] Since 2000, they are in a relationship with Charlie Jane Anders with whom they created in March 2018 the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Newitz changed personal pronouns from “she” to “they” in 2019.[14]

Charlie Jane Anders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Jane_Anders

Charlie Jane Anders was born in Connecticut and grew up in Mansfield. She studied English and Asian literature at University of Cambridge, and lived in Hong Kong and Boston before moving to San Francisco, California.[31]

Anders has sensory integration disorder. She credits her special education teacher for inspiring her childhood writing passion.[32]

Since 2000, Anders has been the partner of author Annalee Newitz.[33] The couple co-founded other magazine.[34][35] Since 2018, Anders and Newitz also host the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.[36]

Anders is transgender.[37] In 2007, she brought attention to a discriminatory policy of San Francisco bisexual women’s organization, The Chasing Amy Social Club, that specifically barred preoperative transgender women from membership.[38]

I disagree about Adam Driver. He has zero charisma or acting chops. Perhaps he could become a B-List action movie star, like Jean Claude Van Damme.

Annalee Newitz Retweeted:

Brand new episode: The Legacy of Scientific Racism. We talk about the origins of scientific racism, and how it's still affecting science and science fiction. Plus we talk to @AngelaDSaini about her book Superior: The Return of Race Science.https://t.co/50Ii3qtFGp

— Our Opinions Are Correct (@OOACpod) December 19, 2019

so they are just a bunch of heterosexuals, got it

This.

For personal reasons I don’t celebrate the holidays but wish all of you a great holiday season.

Apparently it still hasn’t hasn’t occurred to these childless bohemian futurists and transhumanists like Newitz that future societies will become more traditional, conservative and decidedly un-Woke due to differential fertility. The women who inherit the genetic predisposition to resist feminist indoctrination tend to marry and form largish families, while the women who throw away their sexuality like Newitz die as evolutionary dead ends. After a few generations, the genes for traditional, functional human behavior come to dominate the society again.

These societies might still become and stay technologically advanced, but the women who live happily in them would look like characters from a thinkable “Cyborg-Maid’s Tale.”

To All My Democrat/SJW Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2020, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To My Libertarian/Republican/MAGA Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

To NeverTrumpers:

FOAD.

Annalee Newitz: All ideology, ALL the time.

Star Wars fan: But I just wanted to see a good movie.

Annalee Newitz: “Good” means morally strenuous. No aesthetics. No pleasure. Our Puritan fathers taught us that. My Cultural Studies professors reinforced it. It’s the only reason I got this job. All ideology, ALL the time.

Star Wars fan: Jeez, lady, it’s Christmas. What’s wrong with pissing away a couple hours with the family?

Annalee Newitz: In the age of Trump? With the work of the cultural revolution yet unfinished? Sacrilege! All ideology, ALL the time.

Star Wars fan: Whatever, I’m going home…

Annalee Newitz: Reprobate! How dare ye? ALL IDEOLOGY, ALL THE TIME!!!

What does the vision of sugarplum Annalee Newitz:

say about America?

“ Anders is transgender.[37] In 2007, she brought attention to a discriminatory policy of San Francisco bisexual women’s organization, The Chasing Amy Social Club, that specifically barred preoperative transgender women from membership.”

The right of men in dresses to bother lesbians shall not be infringed!

Annalee Newitz Retweeted:

The Future of Another Timeline by @Annaleen is one of Hudson's Best Fiction Books of the Year. Buyer Rebecca recommends it.https://t.co/SKIF8BGUsD#BestBooks2019 @torbooks pic.twitter.com/MbTTrFwUj8

— Hudson Booksellers (@HudsonBooks) December 22, 2019

Happy Hanukkah! If you're looking for a book about angry Jewish girls traveling through time and kicking the ass of the white supremacist patriarchy, check out my novel THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE. There's even a music video to go with it. https://t.co/HRBBJ0DvGz

— Annalee Newitz is @[email protected] (@Annaleen) December 23, 2019

Putin should demand an investigation so that he could find and punish those who wasted scarce Russian federal resources on such a useless operation.

Newitz is the kind of person from whom I wouldn’t take advice on what flavor ice cream to get. In the past, people with her degree of mental illness were confined in asylums. I understand that we live in enlightened times and she should be left alone and not punished for her perversion. But here this sterile creature, this evolutionary dead end, is being given ink in the NY Times and instructing us how to structure our children’s future (and without any warning label as to who this is coming from) – I think that’s going too far.

It’s like she doesn’t even understand Star Wars fans. People were complaining about “Han shot first” and Jar Jar Binks long before the Last Jedi. Heck, it’s my understanding they were complaining about Ewoks in the Original Trilogy. But, as RedLetterMedia pointed out with Ghostbusters, there is a new corporate strategy to politicize crap movies for free advertising and to cover up the fact that they are crap movies. Wokeness really is just a corporate strategy.

I’m thinking murder-suicide .

The latest reworking of Star Wars gets a divided rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences rate it higher than the so called critics, though some have claimed the audience score below wuz rigged. I think it will make plenty of hundreds of millions for Disney though less than the previous two.

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
Critics Consensus
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker suffers from a frustrating lack of imagination, but concludes this beloved saga with fan-focused devotion.

TOMATOMETER

55% CRITICS SCORE
Total Count of critics: 412

86% AUDIENCE SCORE
Verified Ratings from audience: 48,378

The New York Times has apparently become increasingly feminized and pozzed, just as the Financial Times has.

Regarding the race stuff: the bad guys in the original Star Wars were white too (with the exception of Darth Vader, I suppose, who wore black and was voiced by a black actor). And by the third movie, Lucas had already brought in a black good guy, played by Billy Dee Williams.

Regarding the climate change the author mentions, Star Wars would be the wrong medium to deal with it, because it posits a galaxy with innumerable habitable worlds, and faster-than-light travel. So if the climate turns inhospitable on one world, there’s little reason to adapt to it there. For those interested in smart novels on the topic, I’d recommend Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (on the skeptical side) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.

I mentioned in a previous thread that I’m reading a Haruki Murakami novel. In it, a character says about Japanese painting that what it leaves out is as important as what it includes. I wonder if that applies to Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing too. In New York 2140, KSR, who leans left, has, as far as I can remember, nothing to say about transsexuals or gays, and not a whole lot about race. I suppose the point of their absence is that if climate change is really the near-apocalyptic scenario claimed, there won’t be any resources left to waste on the left’s identity politics. My thread on the book is here, if anyone’s interested:

Currently reading New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I’m wondering again if there’s any other novelist firing on as many cylinders as him. #BookClub pic.twitter.com/VjeDe61aGQ

— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) November 30, 2019

Thanks! You got the goods on them. I am getting some good laughs at the above freak show. Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz have been a couple since 2000, so it seems. There is a bit of reversion to the norm here in that Annalee was born female and Charlie was born male. So in an ultra weird way they are long time heterosexual couple.

These people are sick. But it is our fault to take them for our moral and cultural leaders. In a sane world, they would be ignored, if not put in an insane asylum. Instead they are writing for the Jew York Times.

Seriously, let’s simply end this failed experiment that should have ended back in 1860. We don’t want to live around each other anymore. One group wants to be left alone, while the other group wants to steal everything everyone has to create their twisted vision of utopia. Freedom and liberty will NOT stand up to the onslaught, and blood will flow heavily in the streets if we do not demand a dissolution of the Federal Government and a peaceful separation into AT LEAST the 50 supposedly sovereign states (though I think that much more dissolution at the state level will also be required. Sovereignty and freedom were supposed to be the foundation of this country, yet everyone is in fear of the next election as the victors, regardless of which worthless major party they belong to, set out to victimize everyone in pursuit of their agendas. On this day of celebration of the birth of the prince of peace, consider the possibilities of restored freedom and liberty if we would just give up our need to pretend that this is anything other than a DYS-UNION of a nation.

I watched that the other day, I like how they came up with “passive progressivism” more or less on the fly to sum up the political message running through the most recent movies.

https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/shownotes/2019/12/20/episode-47-transcript

Episode 47: Transcript
December 20, 2019

Episode: 47: The legacy of scientific racism

https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/who-we-are

“Totalitarians always confuse mythology with propaganda.”

Authoritarianism is the nemesis of creativity.

I don’t know what to make if this incoherent train of thought. Is Star Wars racist? Is it or is it not ruining the authors childhood? Looking at a picture of them I find it hard to believe they is 50 years old. They or them deserves to be the the new public face of puberty blockers. Move over Greta Thurnburg. Does anybody else think it’s strange that the New York Times is featuring the opinions of perpetual adolescents, regarding topics such as Star Wars and Harry Potter?

“personality devoid black guy”

Black guy wearing African Anger face. It’s a J.J. Abrams Joint.

Completely agree (and LOL).

Buttons not working…

She might not be an evolutionary dead end if her wife kept their nuts ‘n wang and doesn’t overdo the estrogen supplements.

OT:

Bloomberg has spent $120 million on ads so far, Steyer $86 million.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/25/michael-bloomberg-tom-steyer-2020-ads-084823

Expect favorable media coverage of two guys whose hopeless vanity campaigns are keeping a lot of declining media companies from going bust.

Also, SNL has become good again for primary season (at least in small youtube doses) by bringing in old comedians who don’t work there anymore (if ever):

Larry David as Bernie
Woody Harrelson as Biden
Fred Armison as Bloomberg
Will Ferrell as Steyer.

Though the regular cast members doing the rest of the candidates are pretty good too.

• Kill It With Fire: BenKenobi

An odd reflection.

I met her, about two decades ago, at a science fiction convention. She was rather thrilled someone had read of her writing; it was interesting-enough scifi-as-popular-culture stuff. She was the only person I had read who saw the whole social-class analogy with the vampire stories popular in the 90s. She published a short article afterward about how the nerds at the con were an example of how she had finally found her ‘people’, so to speak. I doubt I had much to do with it–she would have met hundreds of people there– but I felt vaguely flattered at the time, as people do.

Time passes, and…Mx. Newitz is published in the NYT, and I read the article with increasing hostility (purely ideological of course; they seem happy with their…partner? and never met me again, so there is no personal animus), as part of a move by my old hometown paper to wipe out the country I used to know, and by people I am forced to call my distant relatives to do the same.

The abyss of time (a mere two decades!) is an odd thing. I can’t say the years have improved me or the nation, and I’d love to turn back the clock, but then who doesn’t want to be young again?

Personal note and opposed sympathies aside, Newitz is in fact correct: Star Wars has been folded into the culture war that extends down to your choice of razors at this point.

I’d like to think the new ‘Ghostbusters’, with its apparently gender-balanced cast of ‘busters and rural Midwestern setting, represents some kind of reconciliation, but…naah.

One thing about reading something from someone who wants to be called “they” is that you know that this person “they” are suffering from a serious mental defect and/or have a narcissistic personality disorder. And expect you to treat them as normal. In fact demand that form of obedience. Calling her “they” rather than the correct pronoun.

So it is both an internal mental thinking problem and an authoritarian demand on everyone “they” meet to march to their own odd tune. Like a child who pretends to be a queen riding a unicorn when dressed in a paper crown “riding” a broomstick. Treating “them” as a five year old child.

Of course when such creatures are encountered (mainly, safely on a screen, rather than in person) you know what to expect. I think such people also like to “appropriate” normal feelings of empathy and sympathy for those who have mental disabilities, so “they” receive extra attention and accommodation.

Also, extra Wokeman points are added so your NYT opinion pieces don’t get cruelly laughed at and discarded. “They” are happy about that. You, probably not.

IMHO Star Wars ran its course about 20 years ago. I say: bring back Planet of the Apes!

The New York Times has really crossed over into tin foil hat territory with its obsessive belief that all counter-Narrative opinions are actually Russian agents (with an assist from White supremacists). Even other Trump-hating leftists are laughing at the NYTs paranoid conspiracy theories.

There is a very clear warning label. It consists of three words starting with New and ending with Times.

You’ve come a long way, baby!

I understand how seductive it is to view real life through the haze of some all-encompassing fantasy world — Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos or whatever. I myself admit preferring to see things through the circa-1970 haze of Star Trek, 5-0 and Mission Impossible. And just wait til I get my mitts on the complete set of Mannix.

But a movie ticket and a grudge against normality should not entitle one and all to a prominent spot on the op-ed pages — once sacred ground to this former newspaper editor and reader. The long-range goal is to turn America into a freak show, but in the meantime that’s already been done to America’s opinion pages, which I guess were too white, male and rational to be left alone when new “mythmaking” is needed.

But hey, if my wife gets a sex change, maybe NYT’s op-ed czars will call me to beg for 1200 words on classic TV’s most memorable race war. . .

These stories gesture at a revitalized “Star Wars” mythology that might speak to people who fear rising seas more than superweapons.

Imagine fearing rising seas.

Move inland, problem solved.

Your subway system is flooded? Abandon it, problem solved.

Hurricane danger? Move inland, problem solved.

High-priced coastal real estate? Build a seawall or move inland, problem solved.

Got Whites? Ethnic-cleanse them, problem solved.

Anders almost makes a passable woman if you look at her from the right angle and kind of scrunch up your eyes.

“They also made fans of the early movies livid.”

No, “They” didn’t. “The Last Jedi” did. Although there were a few people who resented the more diverse casting of “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One,” for the most part fans liked those movies, even if TFA was considered rather weak compared to the film it was trying to imitate (Star Wars: A New Hope).

Very few people complained about Rogue One, either. The implication of Rogue One was that we were seeing a grittier aspect of the universe, but it was still the same universe.

Really, it was only the Last Jedi that produced an enraged reaction, and that was largely because much of the movie seemed to be deliberately trying to insult fans of the series. Plot points were simply jettisoned, what should have been an epic moment was turned into a throw-away joke, and things just happened with no set up or pay off.

The SJW issues with TLJ are not simply about disliking the political messages in the story; the issue is that the story seems to want to pound a message into our head without integrating it into the story, or to make a character right just so that the character with the proper identity can be right.

If Holdo had actually acted sensibly and not constantly tried to simply impress everyone with her authority, the idea at the end that she was correct would not have bothered anyone. And people would have taken Rose Tyco seriously as a hero if she had at any time acted responsibly instead of acting like an 8-year-old fangirl.

This is great news. The freakshow from well, the Xes and Xirs pictured above to Jar Jar Abrams and Rian Johnson could not make a story appealing to straight White men if their lives depended on it. Even better, the Star Wars stuff is as appetizing as a turd sandwich.

There is literally no role or respect or honor accorded White men in the brave new world envisioned by these storytellers. If you want to understand the resilience of Trump — its in the poz of everything from Star Wars to Marvel to Gillette Razors or Nissan cars.

[There is a Christmas ad by Nissan, White dude gets successively better Christmas presents, a teddy bear when six, a snowboard in his teens, an original Ipod in his early twenties, now a new Nissan — by his ugly Black wife and two nominally mixed race kids. From an average White guy’s perspective its an invitation to travel back in time to the 1980s. But the ad is meant to annoy/humiliate White dudes and reassure White women that no worries, Black women (ha!) will take that pesky nerd off your orbit]

This means culturally and politically there is ample ground for “guerilla stories” about how some young White man from flyover country triumphs over his many, many enemies despite being atomized and lacking any social network, mostly by being a better, more ruthless killer. Said enemies almost certainly to be depicted as freakshows, people of color, etc.

This is what the triumphalists never figured out, rubbing White dudes noses in it does not sell to White men no matter how much freakshows like it. Star Wars performed well under expectations, and is likely when all is said and done including the purchase of Lucasfilm a money loser for Disney.

Granted that Adam Driver is good as Kylo Ren. Driver is a movie star.

Kylo Ren lost all his charm the minute he took off his helmet. Then we realized he was just…Adam Driver.

The future will be saved by people of color, LGBTQ and semi-attractive white women who will bravely fight off ugly white men trying to bring back the patriarchy.

“Transcript”, transscript? That’s gotta be phobic somehow, someway.

Newitz is the kind of person from whom I wouldn’t take advice on what flavor ice cream to get.

Ever walk into a coffee shop, see the barrista behind the counter looking like Newitz, pause a moment… then just walk right back out? Because, er, reasons?

In the past, people with her degree of mental illness were confined in asylums.

Or taken care of in a private setting, often by family. “The crazy aunt in the little house out back” isn’t just a literary trope. But in the past there weren’t as many of them, and we did not allow them to be social arbiters.

That was then, this is clown world.

Uh, Darth Vader was all black . . . voice included.

The standardized IQ test was a tool developed by eugenicists in the early 20th century, explains Ibram X. Kendi.

Even the definition of intelligence — and the tests and assumptions based upon that definition — exist within a racialized context. https://t.co/pIAGRf3Emg

— NPR (@NPR) December 22, 2019

They have. Where have you been the last ten years?

Well that explains a lot.

“it is our fault to take them for our moral and cultural leaders”

Well, I didn’t vote for her.

The Gray Lady of the Slate, her arm clad in the purest shimmering newsprint, held aloft Editorial from the bosom of the office, signifying by divine providence that I, Newitz, was to carry Editorial. THAT is why they am your king!

in a relationship with a person who is substantially a man dressed as a woman

Analee’s partner is Charlie Jane Anders, whose wiki bio mentions this

In 2007, she brought attention to a discriminatory policy of San Francisco bisexual women’s organization, The Chasing Amy Social Club, that specifically barred preoperative transgender women from membership.

So … still using the name Charlie, still got the male bits, yep, a man in a dress, dating a women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Jane_Anders

The defining aspect of Ashkenazi culture is anti-Gentilism.

People on here deem Annalee Newitz a degenerate. Perhaps she is. But she (and her ilk) are driven much more by subverting Gentile culture. If every Gentile had a transsexual partner, then Newitz’s ilk would be taking traditional hetero partners, disparaging transsexuals in weekly NYT columns, and joking about how Goy cattle are straight out of Gomorrah.

One of the most telling aspects of Ashkenazi anti-Gentile thought came from the Pew 2013 survey of American Judaism. In it, they asked what would disqualify someone from being Jewish. The top answer: viewing Jesus as the Messiah. Being strongly critical of Israel and being an atheist is less disqualifying in the eyes of most Jews. Interestingly enough, the Jews who were the most hard line on this were Reform Jews and college-educated Jews, even more than the Orthodox.

Outside of the Orthodox community, there is no Jewish culture or identity. It is entirely contrived. It exists only as a reaction to Western Gentile culture, much like a bright adolescent who has no concept of himself beyond rebelling against the adults who pull the cart.

See Pew Survey Results:

Driver’s screen presence is so-so. His facial features are … off, somehow. But he’s still more charismatic than the butch Brit (Daisy Ridley) or the bumbling black (John Boyega).

In terms of physical attractiveness, Oscar Isaac is probably the most appealing of the new breed of Soy Warriors. He’s dark and (relatively) handsome. He’s a little short for a Storm Trooper, though.

Isaac and Boyega have gone on record as stating that they petitioned the studio to make their characters gay:
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-no-finn-poe-romance-disney-oscar-isaac

In fairness, Driver also looks ethnically and racial ambiguous even if he is apparently not. And his weird psychopathic space Heathcliff ‘relationship’ with Rey is very popular with female SJWs who have BPD (Who are by far the most prolific Twitter users and who define SJWism and feminism on Twitter for the most part). I assume that is why Rey wasn’t revealed to be Luke’s daughter as that would make her Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren’s cousin and it would be too weird then to introduce all the ship-teasing they put into the second and third film.

Though I think it is obviously that the first film and last scene intended to set up her being his daughter and her not being his daughter robbed the series of some much needed pathos.

One thing to note about Kelly-Marie Tran is that she feels shoe-horned in because she was. After the first film JJ Abrams was asked by two Asian American fan activists why there was no female Asian Americans in his Star Wars film and if there would be some in future. JJ Abrams was caught off guard and made the meme-worthy response of ‘Go Asians!’ and eventually we got Rose Tico.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/go-asians-j-j-abrams-talks-diversity-star-wars-casting-n392081

Charlie Jane Anders: Here’s my Wiscon Guest of Honor speech!
May 30, 2019

Growing up, I was kind of an odd duckling.

I had a really severe learning disability, so I managed to be both super-nerdy and also bad at school. My brain was super good at coming up with random artifacts, but terrible at answers. I got bullied a lot, and even the worst social rejects stayed away from me. A lot of my earliest memories involve just wandering around the schoolyard on my own, getting lost in my own fantasy world full of imaginary creatures and stuff.

And my heroes were always oddballs and misfits. I watched a lot of Doctor Who and Monty Python at a super impressionable age, and this gave me a really skewed idea of how adults were supposed to act.

I haven’t seen the new movie. But all the hype induced we to try to watch The Last Jedi on Netflix last weekend.

It was a dumpster fire of awfulness. The movie violated every minimal standard of competent storytelling.

1. The actors are all completely miscast.

2. The characters they play are utterly one-dimensional. Plucky Girl, Reckless Pilot, Black Guy with No Personality. There is zero character development and no character evolution. There is no reason to root for, or against, these people except that you are told they are on the Good Side.

3. The dialog is stilted and lame and is almost recited rather than acted.

4. The plot is chaotic and nonsensical. People just run around and pull the magic switch at the last moment.

5. There are no coherent rules to the game being played. Technology and Magic seem to be interchangeable. The laws of physics, time and space turn off and on randomly. In short, anything can happen for no reason at any time. So the audience can’t possible get invested in anticipating the plot line.

It’s hard to say what role wokeness played in wasting this movie. I suppose there is no reason you can’t have a well made movie that supports any particular narrative – even SJWism. But this was just plain incompetent.

Star Wars and GamerGate are both the exact same phenomenon: billionaire-sponsored cultural engineering activists got caught trying to invade an entertainment subculture in which they never had a prayer of blending in. They immediately drew upon establishment support to defame the customer base that enabled that subculture to exist. They tried hamfisted Conversation-Having, “Character Assassination,” and the insertion of joyless ad hoc political statement characters. Outsiders and low-information normies knew only what lyingpress investigations and documemtaries told them, which amounted to a third carbon copying of cultural engineering billionaire ideas through the activists and now through journalists. For years, the headline was that Star Wars and vidya are doing fine, but Russian hackers on direct orders from Putin are trying to divide us with fake troll accounts. All this, in a bizarre and inexhaustible crusade of alienation in content and defamation in the press of their own customers, in a larger gamble to turn a fun amusement into a Sunsteinian nudge.
Before this latest iteration came out, hilarious headlines beyond the craziest Soviet damage control preceded opening, admonishing fans to shut up.
When you write a story, you don’t have infinite room. There’s the attention span of your audience (which, for Star Wars, is still categorically children). There’s the issue of familiarity (ease of introduction) versus originality (now spend more time on introduction, taking time away from story). If you set up a framework, you have expended resources. If (as our intrepid heroes desire) you want to subvert a presupposed framework, you haven’t saved yourself any resources, and in fact you have tremendously limited yourself. You can only subvert so many times just like you can only fold a piece of paper in half so many times: this is illustrated in the Futurama gag about the contrarian libertarian activist.
Star Wars in its defensible innocent first iteration (I mean the first damn one to come out, which every normal person remembers as the first one, and I refuse to learn a different system) took enormous energy from the idea of the infinitely varied planets and diverse peoples of a nearly ungovernable galaxy, an update of nineteenth and early twentieth century adventure stories about India, aliens so generously provided that we’d have time to explain them or go into their national and personal histories.
First thing the activists did was chuck the aliens. More room for nonwhite humans. Plus, MiniTruth says the aliens were just metaphorical nonwhites anyway, in which case they’re racism.
The first Star Wars had a decent storyline (plucky revels sabotage the wunderwaffen) which got forgivably recycled in the original trilogy. Unforgivably, the brave new writers, seeing fit to overwrite everything else and give ignomious deaths to the best loved characters, retained that same storyline, and, in illustration of subversion working against creativity, it became almost the only storyline of the new movies.
When George Lucas made the first Star Wars, it wasn’t revolutionary cinema, but it was definitely against a certain grain (when it succeeded it was called the death of serious, grown-up moviemaking by one critic). Lucas had read Joseph Campbell and was trying to do something firmly in an existing literary tradition. In the new movies, the bad guys are clearly the same bad guys as the old movies, with minor changes meant to be meaningless, and with no explanation for why they’re badguying so soon after almost the same group of people got blown up. They have the same uniforms, ships, weapons, motives, weaknesses, agenda, number two and number one as the old bad guys. But at least this time Luke’s a girl with no growth arc. The activists didn’t want to make a movie, they wanted to censor a movie.
It was a genuine pleasure seeing the bafflement, failure-admission, and blamethrowing from these million-dollar idiots this time around.

>‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans.

Are they? My extended family has fiercely divided political opinions, yet strangely enough, we’re happily celebrating Christmas. I’d suggest this is the norm rather than the exception among ordinary people. Which, if you value basic societal stability, is a good thing.

Sounds like the kind of person who writes op-eds for the Grey Lady finds something deeply, deeply wrong about people refusing to prioritize political ideology over bonds of family, friendship, or the practical needs of daily life. Our professional/managerial class is angry. Angry that the peasants aren’t sufficiently angry at each other. Why is that? Because there’s more of a risk that they’ll be angry at them, because they are secretly miserable and want their implicit inferiors to also be miserable, or both?

Rogue One was quite good.

Zero is a number too.

Some used social media to demand that Disney stop with the politically correct storytelling, while others launched racist attacks on the Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Tran, who plays the engineer Rose Tico in two of the films.”

It’s not about race. It’s about a needless plot element who’s acting is mediocre, AND she’s short and dumpy. In other words, she’s ugly. That is, unpleasant to look at.

If you’re not pleasant to look at in an action adventure movie, you better be carrying a big bag of kickass plot with you. Otherwise, the audience will kick you to the curb, every time.

Why did Audrey Hepburn have a bigger career than say, Kim Hunter? Both had about the same acting chops. Kim Hunter’s problem is everybody didn’t want to fuck her on sight. Audrey did not have that problem.

In real life, it works the same. Aziz Ansari’s crime was trying to get to third base, while ugly. He looks like a guy you wouldn’t let babysit your kids, and his voice is like an angry mosquito. If you kept all the circumstances intact, but replaced Aziz with Brad Pitt, and Brad acted twice as arrogant, the world still never would have heard about some guttersnipe girl’s unfortunate sexual adventures.

Hollywood cannot rewrite the rules to the human brain’s circuitry. If they can cast anyone they want, and they choose a little fat chick, the movie will pay for it, and unfortunately, the poor little fat chick.

People get mean when you’re ugly for no good reason in the movies. People are paying good money. They expect more. They want pretty people. They don’t want to be reminded of their real lives, via dumpy fat girls. It has nothing to do with her race.

I actually sat through episode 7 (fuming the entire time) which is basically a scene for scene rip off of episode 4, with all the good “guys” non White Males, and all the bad guys White Males.

As an IT guy, I hope Disney and everybody associated with it burns in Hell anyway.

Oh yeah, the subgenre was called ‘space opera’, after ‘horse opera’ or cowboy stories.

Media companies are willing to piss away hundreds of millions for their causes. Think about Roseanne. That was pure wealth destruction for political purposes.

Kathleen Kennedy is a true believer and has ruined the Star Wars franchise, with a big assist from Hollywood’s #1 hack, J.J. Abrams

‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans.

Off to a bad start with clickbait hyperbole. Not all Americans are polarized, let alone angry. If the writer meant “most” then write most, not “all”. And I’d question even that: a good deal of them are polarized, probably more than in past decades, but most? Any opinion poll to back that up?

all the cast members are first rate actresses

No, they’re not. They’re affirmative action comics being desperately held up to prove feminist are funny.

Often these fights begin with someone asserting that the latest “Star Wars” movie ruined their childhood. That’s not wrong. An attack on “Star Wars” is an attack on what many adults of George Lucas’s generation were taught as children: that the most important good guys are generally white men, and the biggest threat on earth is a superweapon.

This is a blatant lie, as anyone who bothered to see the first three films would identify the enemies as Empire, and the heroes as those who developed the personal spiritual & physical fortitude to defeat it.

Pretty clear why (((Annalee Newitz))) felt she had to nip that in the bud. Interestingly, her Wikipedia page used to show her ethnicity, but Infogalactic retains the expurgated information. I wonder why she felt the need to remove that bit of her history…

I’m one of the few people who don’t like Adam Driver so much

You’re not alone. I call him Darth Emo.

a book about angry Jewish girls traveling through time and kicking the ass of the white supremacist patriarchy

That sounds aggressively terrible.

And if we are really concerned with planet-wide threats like climate change, wouldn’t it be better if these minorities were back home in their low carbon home villages instead of slurping Slurpees in their 82 degree heated Section 8 apartments in Minneapolis?

I trolled an environmentalist site for awhile; this was not a popular topic.

If they engaged at all, there were roughly two camps:

) give immigrants and minorities whatever they want; we’re just here to trash White people.

) We’re all going to eventually be living in local communities fueled by wind-solar-wood, so let’s concentrate on planning for that.

Watermelons in action. ‘Greens’ are frankly the biggest threat to the environment (including from the standpoint of global warming) in existence today.

And it’s heartening to see you’ve retained ‘me’ as your pronoun.

I remember stumbling across a speech he was giving. He said plenty of PC bs, but he subtly inferred that identity politics is how the evil ones keep themselves in power.

and kind of scrunch up your eyes.

If you mean after having them surgically removed, perhaps.

Not a bad idea to try and get a handle on the 3 flicks/TV that are representative of your world view.

For me that would be Soldier Blue; Ren & Stimpy; and Oz.

Using the analytical tools that other technologists deployed to uncover Russian influence during the 2016 election, Mr. Bay found that “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists” were using the “Star Wars” debate “to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality” and that “a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

As the left has long known the forces of Trumpism are populated with xenophobes and foreign spies!

I like how they came up with “passive progressivism”

Gay Rise of Skywalker discussion leading up to Mike’s great coining of the phrase “passive progressive”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pAsss_nTlk&feature=youtu.be&t=3215

No one who actually lived through the 1970s would dash off a thumbnail history as stupid as this one. There is no one at The Times to turn the ship around, so more silly nonsense like this and the 1619 Project will continue to amuse us, while degrading all credibility of a once notable newspaper – however overpraised a rag it now seems. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for the laughs. But I’m fearful future generations may be taught such chimpy garbage in school. …As true.

This is a good point. It takes remarkable, willful, effortful dishonesty to say that Star Wars was a movie about the goodness of white men. This is consistent with my point about a political agenda limiting creativity (when everything is always about race, your point is made for you, usually incoherently). Lost in the journactivist’s race obsession is that it was a movie about people becoming good, and that this depth might only be possibly by setting aside or obviating one-for-one racial pigeonholing. Which is a major reason why the new movies, which are explicitly race cipherism, are unwatchable.

Shame on everyone who spent his Christmas Day posting stomach-turning images of the mentally ill.

Let’s do better on the feast day of Steve’s patron. It’s already here in Cork and Dingle. Some of the figures shown above might do well to dress for the occasion:

St. Stephen’s Day (Lá Fhéile Stiofáin), or the Day of the Wren (Lá an Dreoilín), is an occasion to commemorate the life of St Stephen, a Christian martyr.

https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/ireland/st-stephen-day

It is an official public holiday in Austria, Balearic Islands, Catalonia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Montenegro, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Poland. The date is also a Public Holiday in those countries that celebrate Boxing Day on the day instead/as well.

http://www.calendarpedia.com/when-is/st-stephens-day.html

But not America!

Ever walk into a coffee shop, see the barrista behind the counter looking like Newitz, pause a moment… then just walk right back out? Because, er, reasons?

I stopped going to Starbucks because nearly every single person working there was one type of visibly-obvious Clown World denizen or another and I didn’t want them touching my food and drink.

The Finn character in the “sequel” trilogy is a bit of a mystery.

I presume the need for a “main” character arises from the theory of (American) ethnic groups needing to have someone to “identify” with in blockbusters but it’s played out oddly in this case.

First they cast a British actor. And then the character when a stormtrooper (supposedly from a “breeding program” yet 5’9”) is cowardly and indisciplined and works in sanitation.

Once in the “resistance” he’s still always on the edge of running away, a bit fresh and in fighting scenes turns on a whooping it up pro sports scoring celebrations persona.

Hundreds of hours of potential politically correct “story group” workshopping led to this??

>Adam Driver is good as Occasionally Shirtless Teen Vader

He’s a not-scary tantrumming baby man in search of a character, and thanks to NPR, we now know that this isn’t even acting.

Disney outrageously faked the lemming deaths in “White Wilderness” to make a buck. They perpetuated the suicide myth. The original fake media, ahead of their time.

Annalee Nitwit (oops, Newitz) spent part of the last 3-4 years working at the once-respected tech site Ars Technica, where she (I have no fucks to give about “preferred pronouns”) was instrumental in turning the site largely into a Vanity Fair clone. It was pretty obvious she was going to end up full-on SJW. Unfortunately, Ars Technica seems to have passed the point of no return; I still check in there occasionally but only with an ad blocker enabled to avoid giving them any advertising revenue.

There needs to be a Red Star icon for real Russian and ex-CCCP nation trolls (similar to the blue checkmark thing that Tweeter employs). But few such stars would be awarded, because there aren’t many such trolls needed. The West is its own worst enemy.

Why do we in the US freak out about a pretty, red-haired Russian lady in New York who does the social circuits, or a not-so-hot lady who befriends a few NRA types? This is a big deal? Our eyes and attention are distracted by this petty crap.

Russia (and China) never lost sight of the fact that the United States and its satellites are the primary threats to their interests. They don’t worry about the number of trans actors in this year’s Hollywood films or network series.

Almost as if a certain segment of Jews really hate Whites. Weird.

This is what they always leave out when they talk about “racist” fans criticizing the new movies:

“I entered the room and it was the whitest room you’ve seen. So I said, why not mix it up a little?”
–JewJew Abrams

I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was close to this. “The whitest room” and “mix it up a little”.

He threw out White actors and specifically looked for non-Whites to replace them. He took the Star Wars canon, established in decades of novels and comics, and erased it.

What would happen after the original trilogy was always known. Leia and Han Solo would have twins, a boy and a girl, who would be trained in the Force at the new Jedi academy run by Luke Skywalker. They would be at the center of the new development. There were tons of novels about this world. (I haven’t read any of them, but I know what was going to happen.)

Kylo Ren, by the way, was always White. With blond hair and blue eyes. J.J. Abrams made the character Black – a Black who looks like he comes straight from Africa.

Yes. People don’t know this, but George Lucas originally planned this:

-Magic in space, looking for a magical artefact, like a crystal (the Force was invented by someone else)
-Luke Skywalker would be a midget
-Han Solo would be Black or an alien (the alien rubber suit instead went to Greedo)
-Leya and Ben Kenobi would be Asians

George Lucas never understood greatness and had no use for it. The original movie was mostly directed by his teacher from film school. Others were involved too. By the third movie Lucas had begun to believe the praise, so he had more of a hand in it, and we got Ewoks instead of Wookies defeating the Empire’s elite unit with sticks and rocks.

The prequel trilogy showed truly what a mess there is in George Lucas’ head. Had that trilogy gone first, or had Lucas ideas about space magic prevailed, no one would have thought twice about Star Wars.

The first script was delayed and changed over and over again. There is no end to the bad ideas Lucas had for it.

By the way: Darth Vader’s helmet is based on German WWII soldiers’ helmets. The long rifles carried by some stormtroopers are based on German WWII rifles. And of course they are all White in the Empire, fought by a diverse resistance.

(Someone will at this point say, “No, the stormtroopers are non-White clones!” That’s in the prequels. Long after the original movies. They couldn’t very well show an endless row of Whites at that point, could they? But they couldn’t make the stormtrooper clones all Black either, that’d be too obvious. Or Asian. So they chose a Maori, someone who is just light dark with no special features. As racially indistinct as they could possibly get.)

The Empire in the comics is “specieist,” with humans acting like Nazists. And of course it’s mostly White humans. They even have a Hitlerjugend. Same as the enemy First Order in JewJew Abrams’ new tripe.

And in George Lucas’ prequels, the groups who resist the Republic are all “capitalists,” like the Merchant Guild, the Banker Clan, etc. Led by the evil Sith. And Palpatine gets to rule by decree after a vote in the Senate, just like Hitler got to rule by decree after a vote by the Conservatives and Nationalists in parliament.

Time travel, “Comstockers”… what is this, a bad Bioshock Infinite fanfic?

“Happy Hanukkah! If you’re looking for a book about angry Jewish girls traveling through time and kicking the ass of the white supremacist patriarchy”

So lame, man. So incredibly lame.

Its propaganda all right, but not Russian. Its a deflection, a Russian, hey squirrel.

Nobody likes this vision except the Abrams, Soros, etc. tribe. Some stupid funny papers about 2800 brown skinned slaves.

Hey, if you cannot trust Satan, who can you trust?

Dis will woik out well. Trust Baphomet. That goat head is a genyous, I tell ya.

The Tom Steyer ads we’ve been seeing in the Northeast are indistinguishable from parody. His ads are shameless pandering to fanatics and idiots. All the ads need is a laugh track to make them hilarious SNL shorts.

Best of the Worst: The Star Wars Holiday Special (FOR REAL)

Published on Dec 26, 2014
This time, the group actually gets around to talking in depth about the ill-fated 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

Hollywood’s days of producing good product are over. It’s business, as Hyman Roth said in Godfather II, back when they still made good product. First, they do not care what anybody who can read or write a comment here thinks. All they care about is what people who have a completely different version of the English language in Kuala Lampur or Bombay or Rio de Janerio think after they have bought their ticket. It’s a global economy now.

Second, they are in a mature phase of the explore / exploit cycle. Creativity only happens in the explore part and they are just exploiting now. They explain this stuff in Algorithms to Live By which is a really great book and reading it is a way better usage for one’s time than watching anything new that comes from the movie industry in 2019. 2020. Whatever.

Charles Manson’s buddy Nikolas Schreck had a great interview on Midnight Writer News where he talks about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He particularly liked that Mama Cass and Steve McQueen were in the movie. Those are two people that in Schreck’s rundown (The Manson File) knew way more about the crime than they ever let the police department in on.

He has done three interviews there that sum up to about 6 hours and I thought they were outstanding. The latest one is from 6 november where he talks about the Tarantino movie.

https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-133-nikolas-schreck-on-charles-manson-and-the-tate-labianca-murders-50-years-later/

He has a newly revised version of The Manson File arriving really soon now!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

I’m one of the few people who don’t like Adam Driver so much and doesn’t understand why recently he seems to be in all movies. I mean, he’s good as an actor I suppose, but he has a strange face and I don’t like his voice.

Count me in as another who fails to understand the appeal of Adam “The Schnozz” Driver.

Plucky Girl

You spelled, “Plucky Androgyne, ” funny:

Love the androgyne’s xenomorph grin as well:

Why would director Christopher Nolan cast John David Washington, the lead actor of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”, as the lead of his next movie “Tenet”?

It’s amazing that these “people” can muster the energy to screech about the same thing over and over again. It would be exhausting to live in a constant frenzy of ideological warfare like them.
That being said, part of her turning up the crazy to 11 is the realization to even the slowest dullard in her crowd, that no one cares about the carcass of political Star Wars anymore. The success of The Mandolorian shows that quite well, and Iger and Disney know it, so the days of overt propaganda masquerading as Star Wars is over. It really wasn’t a good decision to bet on Star Wars anyway, because unlike comic book giants, the Skywalker saga ran out of gas in 1983-thereafter it had one story (Skywalker/Vader) and limiting anything new.

Yes. Peace to all men.

And a new decade… fresh new start.

It’s been fun.

OT: David Cole is ranting about conservative boycotts of conservative films over on Takis:

https://www.takimag.com/article/hollywood-conservatives-year-of-self-harm/

Steve tweeted about it:

Conservatives keep boycotting conservative movies like Damien Chazelle's Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man" and Clint Eastwood's "Richard Jewell."

Hollywood Conservatives’ Year of Self-Harmhttps://t.co/cI8WLDIlhM

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) December 24, 2019

I think that what they fail to get is that no normal people know who the hell these boycotters are or listen to them. The effect on the box office was surely miniscule. Nick Searcy? I had no idea who he was until Cole explained. He’s top tier? The other guy, the gay conservative? Even less. I’d have to go reread the article to even recall his name.

The reason I didn’t see Richard Jewell wasn’t because of some particular boycott of that film. It’s because I just am not that interested in going to the movies anymore. Hollywood hates me, and a few conservative films don’t really put a dent in that. Plus, I don’t really like the genre. If I want to see people behaving badly I can read the news.

OT:

34-year old mulatto hailed as the new Howard Cosell suddenly and mysteriously dies of pneumonia and the (((media))) demands his worship:

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/espn-reporter-edward-aschoff-dies-of-pneumonia-on-34th-birthday/1861gfu5wa9sl14o01vxy7m4zk

K.

But wait, there’s more!:

https://heavy.com/sports/2019/12/edward-aschoff-dead/

So this alpha dawg posts how his pudgy huwhyte girlfriend proposed to him on Instagram?

The media seems to have spelled, “100% on the down low GRIDS victim, ” funny.

Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans.

Trump won the 2016 election. To a certain sort of person, this can only be explained by the anger of Trump supporters, never by the dishonesty, incompetence, and divisive campaigning of his opponent.

As a result of Trump’s election, the other roughly 50% of the electorate became angry. And they can’t conceive of any reasonable person not evincing an overwhelmingly hostile reaction to this outcome. Ergo, everybody over the age of 12 must be angry.

George Lucas never understood greatness and had no use for it. The original movie was mostly directed by his teacher from film school. Others were involved too.

Have some citations for that, have you? I never heard about his film school teacher directing New Hope. That would explain some things.

If true, it makes the whole Star Wars tragedy make a lot of sense. The Empire Strikes back was considered the best overall episode, Lucas didn’t write the script, and fought against the director, a very story-driven/relationship kind of guy, most of the time, from what I’ve read.

The worst mistake Lucas made, imo, was making Anakin Skywalker a little shit from the get-go. Where to you go from being an asshole? A bigger asshole. Who cares? It would have been far more dramatic to have a character similar to Luke Skywalker go from good to shitty, than a character going from shitty to shittier.

It would be the same as if Luke was established as a little shithead prior to finding out Darth was his father. The audience response, instead of the hair going up the back of their necks, would have been, “yeah? so? you’re an asshole, your dad’s an asshole. got it.”

Lucas has to be fucking tone deaf to do it the way he did it.

Also, he implied via Kanobi that Jedi Knights were something like the Knights of Camelot. It seemed further established with the introduction of Yoda as a shaman-like master. Then Lucas writes a script in which they are a huge part of a democratic gobbledegook. They were all in the middle of a massive political monstrosity, and took it seriously. They were like an operative cult with a power arm in world government. What… the… fuck?

Who in their right mind would want to join up with that massive shitshow, complete with junior brownshirt Jedi “younglings” in training, and Yoda was fucking Jim Jones!

One more thing… Carrie Fisher was a fucking burned out, brain-damaged crack head. She was videotaped scoring crack on a street corner up until around the time she died. By her last appearance in Star Wars, she had so much plastic surgery, she looked like a minor burn victim, and could no longer enunciate clearly. She had real problems with her s’s. That’s brain damage, and perhaps bad dentistry, since she had lost all her teeth. There was no good reason to have her back in that broken condition, while implicitly asking the audience not to notice how incredibly fucked up she was.

Oh, and two more words, speaking of slight brain damage:
Laura Dern. WHY?!!

I no longer give a shit about Star Wars, and won’t be seeing the latest installment unless someone can guarantee Luke gets gang raped with a light saber. I’d still pay to see that.

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

Would it not be better to conduct public affairs informed by reality rather than mythology?

But this is current-year woke America, where “sophisticated” people look for deep meaning in Star Wars and “cosmopolitan” people have life experiences that are almost completely limited to the Upper West Side of New York City.

As we close the book on the 2010s, I’d love to see iSteve commentariat thoughts on:

(1) What, exactly, the new additions to the ‘myth’ were in the 2010s (one way to approach this being, What would surprise the average person, sitting back in early January 2010, about what the world would be like as of the last week of December 2019? What would he have thought not possible but is now on-the-ground reality? IOW, serious movement of the myth-ground under him);

(2) Predictions/guesses on what new additions to the ‘myth’ will be pushed in the 2020s.

Here are two thoughts related to the first question, from a thread a few days ago (#115). I suggested two of the biggest surprises were Trannies and Trump (not in that order; as for the ‘Myth,’ Trump always represented a rupture in the myth-time-space continuum):

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

We desperately need a new mythology that movie goers will happily pay $12 to go see in a movie theater. Woke retreads of old franchises leave us in a storytelling uncanny valley where we are being asked to suspend our disbelief that white characters can collaborate successfully with nonwhites who want to erase them.

A few deeply held leftist tenets in all of this:
– art, movies and such define “our” reality.
– whenever the word “our” is used, the few have the right to speak for all.
– whenever the left interprets art, movies and such, opinion becomes historical fact.

AFAIK, you’re both wrong here. The Empire Strikes Back was directed by a former USC film school lecturer, and USC alumnus Lucas sought him out for the job.

Darth Vader was all black

Thanks for the videos of the St Stephen’s Day celebrations. It brings back fond memories of the Clancy Brothers commemorating the wren’s demise in song!

What these current ethnic commemorations may be, just maybe, signifying is that it’s not as bad as the Irish Savant believes (although I have my doubts!).

Addenda:

Note in Reg Caesar’s video that the Wren Boys (and gals) have pails for donations to bury the wren!

How much of Adam Driver’s career is due to him look very Jewish? He’s not Jewish, but looks very Jewish and plays a lot of Jewish characters. He played a Jewish character in “BlacKkKlansman” and in his breakout role on the TV show “Girls”. There tends to be lots of Jewish roles available, since there are lots of Jews in showbiz, so I would imagine he benefits from that since he fits the type. I would also imagine he benefits to some degree from looking Jewish even if he isn’t actually Jewish from Jews in showbiz and media who wish to promote someone who resembles one of their own, even if only subconsciously.

There are plenty of great actors whose careers never go anywhere despite their talent. And most actors with Driver’s level of looks would generally be typecast as villainous heavies at best.

And a new decade… fresh new start.

But is it? 2020 is the last year of the second decade of the 21st century. Yet it’s the first year of the third decade of the 2000s.

Why are centuries ordinal, and decades cardinal?

Petition: Barbara Walters to do the ball drop on New Years to say “I’m Barbara Walters and this is 2020”

And a recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.

Using the analytical tools that other technologists deployed to uncover Russian influence during the 2016 election, Mr. Bay found that “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists” were using the “Star Wars” debate “to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality” and that “a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

Using “Star Wars” as the vehicle was a canny move by the trolls.

Don’t like affirmative action casting, gay make-out scenes, and heavy-handed political messages in your movies? Then you’re a “troll” and a “political operative.” And probably Russian.

Yeah, ok, lady. You can pretend it’s “the Russians” if you like, but you know very well that there are millions of practically Nazis right here in America. And they are willing to give their honest opinions for free.

It’s true that many right wingers attack and mock stuff like feminist Ghostbusters. So what? It’s not like feminists, etc., leave their politics at the door of the movie theater.

Also, this:

Due to an estimation error, Jesus of Nazareth was actually born on Dec. 25 of the year 5 BC, not Dec. 25 of 1 AD, on our calendar.

(Yes, I know Dec. 25 is not, technically speaking, the real birth date, or likely not, and that the real birthdate is unknown, but it’s too late to change now; the birth certificate has been printed and is on file. The year is more important anyway.)

This would make us now about to enter the second quarter of the first century of the third millennium anno domini (2,025 years after the birth of Christ). Phew.

At a glance, Driver can look Jewish – dark hair, prominent nose, etc. And the context – being an actor, playing a Jewish character, etc. – tends to reinforce it so you just assume he’s Jewish. But you’re right that on close inspection he doesn’t particularly look Jewish. He actually looks like he would be part American Indian or something. Wiki doesn’t indicate any Indian ancestry, but it says his family is from Arkansas and Indiana, where presumably having some Indian ancestry isn’t unheard of. He kind of looks like an inbred redneck type from the Ozarks with some Indian thrown in.

I think you’re right that he benefits somewhat from his unusual, exotic appearance. He kind of reminds me of Keanu Reeves, although obviously not as good looking.

Isaac is good looking but not very sympathetic looking. He has an unctuous, devious vibe. He was good in Llewyn Davis but didn’t really look the part modeled on Bob Dylan. Folk singers tend to look earnest and or a bit rough.

He’s got a giant honking nose, shiny black hair, and pale white skin without freckles or ruddiness. If I didn’t know, AJ would be my first guess!

The Jewyist looking non-Jewish actor is Jason Biggs.

There’s even an article about this:

http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/a_nice_notjewish_boy_20010810/

For good measure while on the topic of precision within our Christian calendar:

Oxford scholars Colin Humphreys (1941 – ) and W. Graeme Waddington published a paper in the 1980s, using all available evidence and incorporating the best astronomical data, that found the day of the discovery of the empty tomb, the Resurrection, or as we usually know it, Easter, must have been either April 7th of 30 AD, or April 3rd of 33 AD, with (they say) the latter more likely — and in either case putting Jesus in his mid-thirties during his ministry in Galilee if the 5 BC birth date is right.

The Battle of Shiloh was April 6–7, 1862. If the 30 AD date is correct, they were fighting on the chronological one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-thirty-second resurrection day, at a biblically named site, they being none the wiser. (Easter 1862 was April 20.)

I enjoyed Eastwood’s The Mule on netflix a year after it was released on film.

Probably will do the same with RJ. It looks good but there’s not much urgency for a film set in 1996.

I just finished up and greatly enjoyed Band of Brothers. I didn’t watch it when it was new because of the excessive marketing of it. It

Dumbo wrote:

I’m one of the few people who don’t like Adam Driver so much and doesn’t understand why recently he seems to be in all movies. I mean, he’s good as an actor I suppose, but he has a strange face and I don’t like his voice.

It’s only a problem if Driver is supposed to play a human being…

That ugly dude had a resemblance to John Legend.

“Star Wars” became a new national mythos; it rebooted America’s revolutionary origin story and liberty-or-death values using the tropes of science fiction.

What?? It’s a fantasy movie based on old-as-Bronze-Age tropes. IN SPACE!. With some WWII scenery (IN SPACE!) to spice it up. It’s practically “The Lord of the Rings” with different props. I can’t fit it into anything “American” no matter how I try. Not even frontier spirit.

And a recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.

The obvious conclusion is that Troll Attribution is a dank snake oil business kept alive by Always Hillaryers in need of a fix and anyone who listens to that stuff is fucking stupid.

In the Madlib Multiverse, this means Russians are leveraging “Star Wars” meedja output to sow dissent and make people think.

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

Why does anybody new a “new American mythology” as if this was some ultra-centralized outfit, immediately defeating the author’s politicial position? This mystery and the attendant mystery of the “we” is sadly left unexplored.

Driver’s “breakout” role was to act like he enjoyed screwing Lena Dunham. That took some serious acting chops!

We desperately need a new American mythology…

The American mythos formerly included Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and actual persons Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. There is a whole rich mythical genre of folk tales, songs, poetry and novels of early America. There have been a lot of wars, a Great Depression, a space race, and natural disasters that a volk-ish people could mine for new mythologies if they were so inclined. But a diverse polity cannot agree on its mythos, much less its actual history and heroes. So its mythmakers (formerly poets and writers but now corporate media) generate these convoluted, tepid stories completely unmoored from anything “American,” or any other real place for that matter. Having destroyed heritage America, the destroyers find the thin gruel of neo-America unsatisfying, so they whine like a spoiled toddler over the toy he broke during a tantrum. I don’t know what to tell them or anybody; not every broken thing can be fixed.

Bloomberg’s ads are no picnic either.

Heck, some of Mike’s spots are so bad they actually work against him and flatter Trump.

That explains WILLOW. It was a remake of his original STAR WARS idea. Luke was a midget.

The worst mistake Lucas made, imo, was making Anakin Skywalker a little shit from the get-go. Where to you go from being an asshole? A bigger asshole. Who cares?

And this is why the entire prequel trilogy is completely uninteresting.

The sequel films would have been better off adapting the Dark Empire series of comic books.

George Lucas got extremely lucky in that he had some people around him who understood how to edit what he had shot into a good movie. This video explains it all pretty well:

Once he was given creative control, in the prequels, we were able to see his flaws as a filmmaker. The sequel trilogy is the camel that is the horse designed by a committee-no one with any compelling vision of what those movies were supposed to be was pushing them, and no one with any competence was seeing them through to completion.

2010 the New England Patriots are caught cheating by illegally filming opponents.2019 New England Patriots are caught cheating by illegally filming opponents. Nothing much as changed.

“Like a lot of Americans, I have formative memories of my first exposure to George Lucas’s epic tale of space Rebels defeating a planet-destroying Empire. I got so excited as a little kid in 1977 about seeing “Star Wars: A New Hope” that I threw up outside the theater.”

The movie was called Star Wars.

If you look up the actress she is actually pretty, Ruin Johnson put her in a potato sack in order to “subvert” your expectations.

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

they can’t even get orientals to stop shooting rhinos for their horns, and they expect them to care about ‘climate change’?

I can’t fit it into anything “American” no matter how I try.

Not true. It’s a pastiche of cliches from old American movies. The frontier saloon scene. Luke’s parents are living on the frontier, subject to Indian raids. Allies fighting the Axis power but the main heroes are American. The Death Star is a Japanese aircraft carrier. On and on. It’s a WWII movie crossed with a Western.

Agree with the rest of your comment. Seeing Rooshians under the bed used to be a thing on the Right, now that Russia is not longer Communist, it’s a thing on the Left. Rooshians are to Leftists what Joos are to alt.righters. Got dandruff? Halitosis? The Rooshians did it.

You can pretend it’s “the Russians” if you like, but you know very well that there are millions of practically Nazis right here in America.

Well, yes, it’s true that there are still millions of almost Nazis here in America (but America in her book is already majority minority even though it isn’t yet) but they are being manipulated by the Rooshians into these false beliefs. If they hadn’t been tricked by the Rooshians then they would have voted for Hillary and approved of the gay make-out scenes.

As I said before, Rooshians play the exact same role to the modern Left as Joos play on the alt.right. The American people are naive and easily tricked. Some alien force is always coming in and tricking them into do the wrong thing . This force is small in number but they make up for it with their magical trickster powers and manipulation of the media or social networks. If only this force was removed, the American people would have the correct beliefs, which just happen to match my own beliefs.

Star Wars is a movie about space wizards intended for children so all your criticisms are invalid. Didn’t you know? (Shill media quote that’s been making the rounds since The Last Jedi)

Aren’t white people a minority across the globe? So arent we technically already a minority majority country? Not that the people using that term would see it that way…

Ugh…..again with the danger hair! So bold…..so edgy!

Same with Girls, he was the only breakout star of that. He looks interesting, and he impinges.

Looking Jewish isn’t a huge advantage for non-Jewish Hollywood actors, AFAIK. The best case scenario is probably a Jason Biggs sort of career, which has been pretty good, but not really Adam Driver level.

He was great in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewen Davis, but that was one of their more art-house movies. And his role in the very interesting Deus Ex was a bit too weird for stardom too. Would be nice if he got a solid juicy leading role in a commercial and critical success though.

Adam Driver gets cast as Noah Baumbach’s alter ego

In this case, that did actually happen but more often than not, someone like Noah Baumbach wants a MORE handsome version of himself up on screen, both because when he looks in the mirror he sees what he thinks is a handsome guy and wants someone equally handsome to play him, and more importantly, because audiences like looking at good looking people. The #1 requirement for being a movie star is not having great acting chops but having a face and a body that the camera loves – this is why so many movie actresses start out as models. You can be taught to act but you can’t be taught how to be good looking. It’s a cliche that when real life figures are played on screen, the movie versions are almost always better looking than the real life versions of themselves.

Driver is a somewhat strange looking dude but the overall effect is not painful to look at – in the end his features are symmetrical and masculine. The Nazis BTW would tell you that he has an aquiline Aryan nose and not a Semitic nose – just having a BIG nose doesn’t make you Semitic looking.

Someone like Kelly Marie Tran OTOH is always going to be a “character actor” at best. She just doesn’t have the face or body to carry a picture. You couldn’t stand to look at her for 2 hours straight no matter how good her acting chops are (and they aren’t very good):

Unfair. She is a perfectly cute woman. Not super curvy but there’s nothing wrong with her looks.

What doesn’t make any sense is making this 120 lb. woman into an ass-kicking superhero on screen when her real-life ass kicking abilities are probably 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. There are real women with ass-kicking abilities but they don’t look like Daisy, they look like this:

The Hollywood fantasy is that you can have it all – you can be feminine and tip the scales at 120 lbs. AND you can still kick men’s asses.

mass immigration means the end of even pop culture like Star Wars

What the Hell? I LOVE mass immigration now!

Annalee Newitz (born 1969) is an American journalist, editor, and author. They have written for the periodicals Popular Science and Wired.

Charlie Jane Anders is an American writer and commentator. She has written several novels and is the publisher of other magazine

That’s how you can tell if they’re male or female; among today’s chattering classes, only a man would use the pronoun she. Biological females otherwise use they or zhe. It’s very very simple, once you fall on your head violently enough.

What do you suppose occurs first? A paroxysm of global jeering at such moronic narcissism as these pronoun-whores currently wallow in….or just the encroaching heat-death of the known universe? I’d very much prefer the first, though we probably deserve the second.

It’s not about race. It’s about a needless plot element who’s acting is mediocre, AND she’s short and dumpy. In other words, she’s ugly. That is, unpleasant to look at.

But she could look like this if the filmmaker wanted her to:

Well, you could easily maintain that it certainly is the right time to highlight what a bunch of mendacious, self-serving bastards the FBI were in that high profile episode, and as they have been in multiple similar circumstances in intervening years. So as to, you know, insert this realization into today’s consciousness to make the idea that the FBI has been a seditious force in the life of the Republic in their role in the conspiracy against the legitimate election of President Trump.

As the Brits say, the FBI “has form” in this regard, going way back, and often exhibited.

She’s dumpy and frumpy very appealing.

Because Nolan is a hack simply coming up with dumb concepts to showcase the latest in special effects: slow-motion and other effects in Inception, time-rewinding splices in this one? Denzel’s son has some heat and he can pick up some Pokemon points after all the white leads he’s cast forever.

But spending Russian taxpayer money on denigrating American movies? How does this advance the interests of the Russian state?

In the unlikely event it does turn out that Russian intelligence has targeted the STAR WARS franchise, I’m sure that they were doing it for practice. “Training”, in other words. You get better at stuff when you do it a lot, so if the Russian security forces have a trolling division, then they are probably ALWAYS trolling someone. And high-profile targets that generate a lot of disruption and push-back (such as a once-pretty-good, now ridiculously overrated film franchise that is still beloved by man-children), seem like good practice targets.

Yeah Adam Driver gets cast as Noah Baumbach’s alter ego, that kind of thing. In truth, Driver doesn’t particularly look Jewish, he looks unusual.

He looks a lot like Trevor Lawrence without the blond hair.

I no longer give a shit about Star Wars, and won’t be seeing the latest installment unless someone can guarantee Luke gets gang raped with a light saber. I’d still pay to see that.

That will be in the Ryan Murphy reboot on Netflix.

Wouldn’t one guy with a blaster put a quick end to any lightsaber ballet?

It seems like Oscar Isaac needs somebody to write a screenplay to bring out whatever it is he’s best suited for.

Issac looks like Ian McShane.

McShane had a long, successful career playing handsome but sleazy criminals

Sweet Jesus! What a messed up pair of dolts. Is it any wonder such a meandering screed was scratched out by one of them? Russians have nothing to do with their warped thinking… and I’m being generous in calling it

It’s a cliche that when real life figures are played on screen, the movie versions are almost always better looking than the real life versions of themselves.

It’s an open question whether Warren Beatty looked more like a movie star than Bugsy Siegel.

Someone like Kelly Marie Tran OTOH is always going to be a “character actor” at best.

It’s amazing that Tran was picked over all the other Oriental contenders, given her very average looks.

I was never polarized. I simply didnt play along and buy a ticket to a movie I knew would suck ass. And since I was there on day one sitting at the front row of the original in 1977… I think I have a right to express that opinion. Nobody at Disney gives a damn about my opinion so long as they get the cash. It’s only when you refuse to participate that they start to squirm.

The #1 requirement for being a movie star is not having great acting chops but having a face and a body that the camera loves

This has changed, the top requirement now is being approachable and likable, think Hanks or Bullock. Next is talent, looks and sex appeal are somewhere between third and fifth. Consider the leads of the latest, highly popular Spiderman sequel:

Decent-looking kids, but not what I’d call lookers. I think it’s nice that the kids are not as superficially-oriented as previous generations. Or the cynical take would be that they get their ogling in on Instagram and online porn now, so they don’t need it in the movies.

I always found the notion that a planetary “city” in Star Wars to have a breathable atmosphere as being absurd. Almost as absurd as combat between Obi-wan and Annakin on another planet with zero plant life…. I mean… HOW? So it is with the climate change acolytes and their incessant screeching about things that they have no way of knowing or even testing out… but they “just know” its gotta be so because they believe it.

Not everyone can be taught to act. Some people have trouble even playing themselves. Joan Rivers’ daughter Melissa was panned for her role as herself in a Joan Rivers biopic. There are other examples.

The Fast & Furious franchise cast two former female MMA fighters in recent films: Gina Carano and Rhonda Rousey. Both attractive women, but one thing you notice seeing them alongside typical actresses is how thick/robust they are in comparison.

“The Rise of Skywalker,” released last week, is a muddled and aimless homage to previous films in the series.

What a polite way of saying it was a totally derivative repackaging of the old storyline with a somewhat more diverse human cast.

We desperately need a new American mythology to fit the 21st century realities of a majority-minority nation dealing with planet-wide threats like climate change.

The MOG Strikes Back.

The Impeachment, the Times, and CNN are real. Russians destroying Hollywood aren’t.

I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by carrying the Oligarchy’s gaslights for them. You can go back to above-it-all bothsidesism after we get our country back.

It was such a huge, huge reveal that Darth Vader was actually….Uncle Fester!

One nice thing about KSR’s sci-fi is that he writes about what characters eat, where it comes from, etc.

When “Star Wars: A New Hope” was released, the Vietnam War had just ended in traumatic ambiguity, Richard Nixon had resigned under the threat of impeachment, and the old American dreams didn’t fit our changed reality.

What? Star Wars (not called ‘a new hope’) came out ’77, Vietnam ended ’75, Nixon resigned ’74, last American troops combat deployed ’73.

Who writes this crap? Couldn’t be bothered reading the rest.

Say what you will about lefty culture critics of the past. Atleast they were well rounded and read books. I don’t think the current lot reads anything. Their life revolves around TV and movies.

What I was pointing out is that it is very easy to see the other side’s fallacies but very hard to see your own. I have been accused by alt.righters of being free of illusions when it comes to the African Question but having a blind spot when it comes to the JQ. The thing about blind spots is that you still can’t see them even if they have been pointed out to you. In your mind the analogy fails. X is NOTHING like Y.

Nolan has great concepts but terrible execution. All his action scenes start spectacularly but are carried through very poorly- his role model Michael Mann I’m sure is appalled. Hyper exposition and self aware cleverness almost ruined the Batman movies and Inception.
Less said about Interstellar the better.

I actually do believe most Americans are naive and Ernest. And yes Washington DC,NYC etc is filled with bad foreign actors of all stripes to make this powerful nation do it’s bidding. Ok perhaps they are not neccessarily bad as in sociopathic or I’ll intentioned but simply looking outt for their interests Trump is the guy you want with you at the bazaar and the souq to tell that this smooth talking merchant is ripping you off.

The Death Star is a Japanese aircraft carrier.

Thank you. I have read Walter Lord’s Midway book which is a trove of fascinating details about that battle. The capital outlays required by modern naval warfare reduce its human factor by 1/100 to 1/1000 over that of land warfare- much cheaper to equip 10o men with rifles and grenades than encase them in a submarine- and so the opportunity for battle and even war-changing acts of heroism still exist there.

At Midway the US had the strategic advantage thanks to cracking Japanese cipher codes (“Obi-wan, you are our last hope, please take these Imperial blueprints”), but at every level below that it was the Japanese who held the edge- more aircraft carriers at the battle, better planes, better armaments (many US torpedoes were duds which even when they clanged against Japanese ships failed to go off), better tactics (American planes were sent in piecemeal against a Japanese carrier task force executing a perfect “box” defense). Even the average pilot quality was on the side of the Japanese- Lord recounts a hotshot Zero pilot flying over the Midway airstrip upside down (“don’t get cocky, kid!”). The Zero pilot was, however, soon blown out of the air by Marines on the ground with shotguns.

But for all that a single individual- Wade McCluskey- turned the tide of battle by going off course and then refusing to head back until his squadrons made contact with the Japanese, catching them at their most exposed with fuel and bombs all over the decks and ready to combust as a counter strike was being prepared. Luke shot once- twice?- at the Death Star with his double laser canons? The number of bombs released by McCluskey’s squadrons that found their mark and changed the course of history would have exceeded that by a factor of at most 4- i.e. could be counted on both hands.

On Seinfeld, at one point they wanted to get George Steinbrenner to do a cameo playing himself but when they filmed him he was completely wooden on camera and unusable.

Your theory (even though unlikely) at least makes some sense. They’s thesis was that they were doing it in order to discredit the globohomo agenda and sow division among the ranks of Americans. The Russians would probably PREFER if America goes all globohomo because it weakens us.

“we need a new mythology…”

Well, you didn’t quite get a /new/ mythology, but in “The Hunger Games” series you got an updated version of the old mythology at least done by capable professionals and genuine artists.

Jennifer Lawrence as The Mockingjay: a genuinely heroic character — tragic, conflicted, damaged, afraid, unsure of herself, yet full of courage and audacity, and played by the greatest actress of our time, a star with flat-out supernova chops and gravitas. As opposed to Somebody Anyone, the sexless anonymous space-elf Rey, played by a dull version of galactic Greta Thunberg.

The Hunger Games is the rebellion of the beaten-down White Deplorables, with a Diverse squad on board, against an evil tyranny that looks like it publishes HuffPo and Salon. It’s the old saw of scrappy rebels against Evil White Guy, but the cast is top-notch and they really sell it so the characters seem like individuals rather than the archetypes they are. Jeffrey Wright is such a good actor that he can do Crippled Black Computer Genius without making you vomit, Donald
Sutherland can give you a particular evil white guy rather than THE Evil White Guy, and Woody Harrelson, who is along with Ms. Lawrence the other greatest actor of our time, can sell you anything.

Best of all, rather than more Star Wars, it was new material. That is what’s really lacking, new material. Give Star Wars a Viking funeral and cook up new stuff already.

There used to be more but the champions of freedom shut them down.

It’s not the exact same role because Abe Foxman, George Soros, HIAS, and the various organizations, activists, and loudmouths who push open borders for the West but sovereignty for Israel actually exist, and would be the first to tell you what they’re proudly doing. An example of an equivalent would be me criticizing Israel and then being “explained” as an ethnically and nationally Palestinian person. The Russian hackers phenomenon is leftists refusing to believe that not everyone agrees with them. Its historical analog might be “wreckers” and “objective pro-fascism” in Stalinism: it is not possible for a Soviet worker to make a mistake, so he must be a Hitlerite.

But is it? 2020 is the last year of the second decade of the 21st century. Yet it’s the first year of the third decade of the 2000s.

Why are centuries ordinal, and decades cardinal?

Petition: Barbara Walters to do the ball drop on New Years to say “I’m Barbara Walters and this is 2020”

They’ll have to do it in CGI, since Barbara Walters currently doesn’t know what “Wednesday” is.

I think the next cultural “big thing” for boomers will be realizing they’re dying.

That hasn’t seemed to have sunk in yet. They keep going to old media standbys. I think that’s why boomers get so excited about Betty White, and kneel to Dick Van Dyke, even though they’re falling apart at the seams. As long as they’re vital, we’re okay. They serve boomers as faux gatekeepers at the caldron of infinity.

>Adam Driver isn’t classically or stereotypically Jewish-looking

Is Steve’s Adam Driver thing a kind of subtle trolling?

No mainstream production would allow a black gay character surely? Black masculinity must never be called into question.

The Fast & Furious franchise cast two former female MMA fighters in recent films: Gina Carano and Rhonda Rousey

.

Carano is in the new Mandalorian series, playing an ex-“shock trooper”, whatever that is. She’s brawny enough to be (mostly) believable in the fight scenes.

The critics are just pissed because JJ Abrams (thankfully) ignored/undid everything Rian Johnson did in the previous movie. Our family (consisting of both liberals and conservatives) saw it this holiday and thought Rise of the Skywalker was pretty good, and miles better than the dumpster fire that was Return of the Jedi. It’s too bad JJ didn’t helm all three movies but Kathleen Kennedy was incompetent when it came to enforcing a consistent vision across the trilogy. I don’t understand why she wasn’t fired after TLJ, talk about ovarian privilege.

There’s a “theory” that the makers of the new Star Wars movies think it’s “unwoke” to cast “traditionally attractive” actors in the leading and near leading roles. Not helping is the hair/make up choices for many of the actors. Daisey Ridley and KM Tran actually look more attractive in “street” pictures/videos than they do in the Star Wars movies. In the original movies, Han, Luke, and Leia all have perfect looking hair and skin (at least as much as that was possible in the late 70’s and early 80’s). It’s been noted that Chinese audiences were alienated by how unattractive many of the actors look in the new movies.

The makers of the new movies are obviously pushing CultMarx non-sense, but since they have Disney’s marketing muscle, the movies aren’t totally flopping. If anything, Disney has somehow created a Pavlovian response in today’s braindead audience for entertainment; if it has a superhero or is another Star Wars movie, therefore, I must go see it. The weird thing is that these “hit movies” never cause people to recite dialogue to one another after seeing the movie(like they did in 1980 after seeing Empire Strikes Back, “Luke I am your father”), nor do you ever really see any normal person “reliving” or re-enacting a key scene from these Disney “action” films. Nobody ever is moved or provoked by anything in these movies. Whereas, everyone in 1983 could quote Dirty Harry. And 32 years after Predator (1987) was released, several lines (“get to the chopper”, you are one ugly mother****er”) are firmly established pieces of iconic movie dialogue.

“The Hunger Games” doesn’t appeal enough to boys and young men and is too lame to qualify as anything approaching mythology. And it’s not epic enough. Like Harry Potter, it seems to appeal primarily to women and homosexual males.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/hunger-games-just-girls/330734/

Nolan is supposed to be some kind of “genius”, yet like most directors since circa 2000 he goes full retard with his murky and aggravating “action” scenes. Likely because he’s hiding CGI and/or the identity of stunt-men, or perhaps he can’t be bothered to convincingly stage fight or chase scenes. The John Wick movies however do use traditional film making techniques for the action (e.g. hold the camera still, and don’t edit the scene like a late 1980’s music video).

Micheal Mann inspired a lot of the later 1980’s aesthetic, yet his 1980’s and 1990’s movies are a lot more stylish and classy than many of the ones that tried to clone his approach.

I think the next cultural “big thing” for boomers will be realizing they’re dying.

When will “post-boomers” ever realize that labelling arbitrarily-chosen “generations” is a dubious practice rarely seen before about 1980?

To paraphrase Maynard Keynes, you’re the slave of some defunct demographer.

Or (sorry, Steve) market researcher.

It’s only been somewhat recently that a lot of movies have been set in the 1980’s. God knows enough movies set in the 1960’s/very early 70’s have been made over the last 40 years. And of course 10 trillion movies have been made about WW2.

The Americans seemed to recreate upper middle class suburbia in 1982-86 really well.

Slightly before my time, but it isn’t like my families’ stuff in 1989 or 92 was all brand new.

Lion of the Blogosphere claims the 1980s hair wasn’t big enough on the Americans. But 1980s big hair was probably biggest around NYC where he was compared to NoVa and Kansas.

https://postimg.cc/DS7WCTFz

Being strongly critical of Israel and being an atheist is less disqualifying in the eyes of most Jews. Interestingly enough, the Jews who were the most hard line on this were Reform Jews and college-educated Jews, even more than the Orthodox.

Local Reform Jews have no problem with a homosexual atheist identifying as “Jewish” and participating in the all various special days – booths, passover, day of atonement, etc. That used to confuse me, because the Mosaic law is real clear about both atheism and “men who lie with other men”. Then I realized that the real religion of Reform Judaism is left wing politics, a lot like the Unitarians. Everything became clear at that point.

In it, they asked what would disqualify someone from being Jewish. The top answer: viewing Jesus as the Messiah.

You sound as if this is somehow supposed to be shocking. The #1 and #2 tenets of Judaism is that there is only 1 God (period – no 3-in-1 gods) and that the Messiah will come someday (and has not yet come). So, yes viewing Jesus as the Messiah would make you a Christian, not a Jew. I think this is pretty basic and obvious.

Would believing the divinity of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma or DENIAL of Jesus as the Messiah be disqualifying for someone to be a Christian?

I don’t remember if I saw the 2nd movie in this trilogy or just the first (I saw the one where Han Solo gets killed), but one additional thing that bothered me about it was that the rebels had won, but now they were the underdogs again? Wouldn’t the old Empire/First Order be the underdogs now?

I find your lack of faith encouraging.

what losers still watch this crap.

it’s like NBA fans arguing about Lebron or Kobe.