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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.

I was onboard with this post, but this came a bit out of left field and seems largely unrelated to the main thrust of your argument.

Yes, Hollywood is disproportionately controlled by Jews, so it's strictly true that Jews are responsible for recent trends in Hollywood slop.

But Hollywood has been disproportionately controlled by Jews for as long as Hollywood has been a thing. From Goldwyn to Wilder to Spielberg, Jews were responsible for some of the most beloved films in the American canon.

Whatever the underlying cause of the downturn in quality in mainstream American cinema, you can't just point to the religion or ethnicity of the people in charge. They have the same religion and ethnicity as the people who were in charge when Hollywood was good.

Yeah I hesitated a bit about whether to mention it. But I felt it necessary to, um, "notice" that this isn't a broad representative slice of America doing this stuff. It's a very niche, inbred culture of people who grew up in Hollywood and all know each other because of their family/religious connections. Maybe it worked out OK in the past because they were talented, but at this point it's just nepotism.

I would actually be interested in whether the Hollywood decline coincided with a loss of Jewish control, like it did with the universities.
In both cases it always seemed like they kept a tight leash on the pet elements that could harm profits/donations: Hakeem Jeffries got the "woah there sambo" treatment in the 90s once he clarified that "soulless white ice people" included the jews.

Once the grievance-studies departments took over the admin staff, the Rudenstines and Bacows couldn't stop Harvard going Gay.

Perhaps Harvey Weinstein's casting couch was the one remaining meritocratic hiring process in Hollywood?

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda. The Acolyte is a good example of this. The showrunner/writer was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant. She likely got this opportunity as a bribe to keep her quiet because she knows where some of the proverbial bodies are buried (blackmail). The lead actress Amandala Sternberg is then selected because her parents have industry connections and she’s from a racial demographic that Hollywood favors (connections, propaganda). The supporting actress is hired because she’s married to the show runner (nepotism). The male supporting lead Lee Jung-jae seems to have been selected mostly due to talent. Notice that we are now four rungs down into the selection process and this is the first time that vocational talent seems to have been considered at all. And from everything I’ve seen in reviews left and right, he’s the only bright spot in this whole shabby enterprise. Many many projects are like this now. In the early days of silent filmmaking up until the 2000s, who got to make movies was primarily dependent on talent and sales. Now it’s like a late feudal monarchy or the Soviet Union. The number of Jews has mostly remained constant and I don’t think it’s a factor in the early success or the later decline at all.

Lee Jung-jae

I find it amusing that the only two watchable people in this atrocity were east asian males.

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda.

I don't know about blackmail, but wasn't Hollywood always run on nepotism, connections, and propaganda?

Dafne Keen as the young jedi girl also brought her A game, and Carrie Ann Moss also brought gravitas. Both could work with facial expression, body language and limited dialogue to still bring character and intent.

You know, acting.

A good actor can be a shining gem in a bad script, but it just highlights how shit the script is and how much of a slog it is to get through. Bad actors in bad scripts just become exhausting, and right now there are no good young black actresses. Zoe Saldana and Zendaya are above average but not Halle Berry or Angela Bassett level, and Dominique Tipper is decent but can't do dialogue. Every other young black woman is some flavor of 'repressed racial rage' and can't fucking smile or joke because that's white supremacy or something. (Note: I heard good things about Abbott Elementary so maybe black talent is concentrated in comedy AS USUAL).

The Noticing variable for an enshittified show is a young black woman who don't take no shit from no man. Scifi is especially guilty of this, and thats why Discovery, Acolyte and Obi Wan sucked balls.

Interesting, I just realized the Expanse (which I really enjoyed) subverted this by having that character in the first few episodes, and then having her fall in love with and becoming a supporting partner with the (white male) lead. But then again, the show writers were constrained by the source material so probably they shouldn't get any credit.

Eh, they can get credit. Her name is Naomi Nagata, and could easily have been asian. They got an indian guy to play a texan hick as well, and no one really gave a shit because the series cleaved its racial differences as space palestine vs 2 faraway superpowers. In fantasy all colors of humanity unite to be racist against orcs, and speciecism is more appealing in scifi than racism still.

Not to the extent that it is now. If you look at biographies for actors and actresses before the 2000s, most of them were nobodies who broke out. Now they’re all some other famous actor’s son or daughter. Directors and producers usually got experience on smaller films or TV and then had one project that got really popular, catapulting them into the big leagues.

This was my question. If anything I'd assume it was worse in the past, given lack of regulation and transparency.

There has been an exponential increase in nepo-babies though, which is in a way only natural as time goes on and the industry grew but it also shows the lack of meritocratic guardrails in the industry.

Maybe there's a synthesis here: Hollywood did use to be pretty corrupt and nepotistic in a way that everyone knew about, but now it's corrupt and nepotistic in a different way we're not aware of.

This is an intriguing take, and one which—ironically—brings to mind a certain argument advanced by antisemites of the European paleoconservative ilk, viz. that the Enlightenment techniques of using reason and logic to question longstanding social norms were at least tolerable in the hands of Christian/Christian-heritage thinkers, who held an almost innate (if unconscious) sense of where to draw the line and stop applying the culture of critique, lest they rend Western society apart entirely. Jews, on the other hand, possessing no such intuitive metis, blew past all Christian guardrails in their blind zeal to make everything rational, scientific, legible—whence the horrors of checks notes communism and the Frankfurt School.

Jews have never been in a proper standpoint to understand Christian morality because they're the outgroup. All moral systems have profound flaws when viewed from the outside. I don't care what gentiles have to say about Jewish culture either because there's minimal chance they really get it.

I do think there's something to the argument that Jews are more prone to fall for the more excessive varieties of left-wing bullshit because they're much more culturally predisposed towards notions of collective (familial, racial, class) based consciousness, guilt, virtue, etc. than the wider West.

Except wokeness in practice isn’t really big into collective responsibility/guilt. It’s all about what you’re owed. A lot of it is actually quite individualist.

And what is the basis of this alleged debt?

It is rarely anything the claimant themselves have done, its all "you owe me because somone who looked vaguely like you wronged someone who looked vaguely like me 100 years ago" or "i deserve to have my choices validated because of [insert group membership here]".

The view isn’t too far from that expressed by various reaction-adjacent Jewish people. In any case, as one myself, I’m skeptical that Jews have any particularly great insight into Jewish culture that gentiles don’t (and vice versa).

I agree, Jews don't know where to stop in their criticisms. But that's a universal human trait. The problem is not "Jews like to destroy other moral systems" but rather "two or more distinct moral factions are incompatible with a healthy society and one will always try to trounce the other". To disdain them for refusing to integrate is natural, but on the inside there's an obvious tension of "Should we ever fully integrate, we may get targeted again but with our now weak communal bonds we'll be far more vulnerable." The best criticism you can give is that modern America doesn't seem like the Jew-persecuting type, but this cycle is so ingrained in them that mindless adherence to "They want to kill us!" is slightly justified. But I'm not in the position to fully dissect all that

This is largely Solzhenitsyn’s argument and is implicit in Churchill’s writing on European Jewishness. I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again and if anything the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it. Essentially Jews embraced liberal ideas both more zealously and more literally because of a combination of their own desire (hardly surprising) to move beyond the previous status quo in European Christian-Jewish relations and because of the specific way in which criticism and commentary upon the Talmud was central to Jewish intellectual culture.

I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again

I agree that it's not necessarily antisemitic, though I think Moldbug is not the best example to use here. I've always found his disavowal of extra-Overton-window takes (on HBD, liberal democracy, and antisemitism) to be lukewarm at best and performative at worst. My pet theory is that it's a kind of Kolmogorov complicity by proxy: though he's far from the levers of power himself and (genuinely, as far as I can tell) professes no desire to get closer, he doesn't want guilt by association to tarnish the prospects of any politico who openly touts him as an influence.

the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it

This is news to me; I wasn't aware that the MacDonald school* even knew about this argument, let alone disagreed with it. What's their take?

*Not to be confused with Hamburger University

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