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Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.
Since you don’t play games, let’s talk movies. Assume you have to choose between a perfectly neutral film and one that flatters your politics. How much is that flattery actually worth?
We don’t really have to imagine this, because the Christian film market exists. They’re still trying to tell compelling, entertaining stories, but they’re doing it without the talent, funding, or awareness advantages of Hollywood. As a result, they are generally worse on technical and social metrics. The audience is there because they think the messaging is laudable.
Come on, now.
Are you implying that a Christian would perceive Holywood movies as "perfectly neutral"? Because from my understanding of US Christians, they would think a more accurate analogy would be between political movies with politics you like, but cut off from major funding vs political movies with politics you hate, but with budgets in the nine digits.
I think that there's something to be said for a movie's thinking that it's neutral (because it's part of the hegemonic culture) actually making it somewhat more neutral. Sure, I'd rather that movies comported with my values rather than values I find noxious - but I'd also rather have movies take values I find noxious for granted rather than try to sell their noxious values to me.
Better a movie written by someone who thinks gay people are normal than a movie written by someone trying to make them normal.
There's a common refrain among the "woke" that all art is political/ideological, and if you don't notice it in some work of art, then that's just because it's pro-status quo, and you're just comfortable with the status quo. What I've come to realize is that, buying into this framework, art that is political/ideological in the pro-status quo perspective is better than other art. Not categorically or anything like that, but that a work of art having a pro-status quo political/ideological message is something that meaningfully improves that work of art compared to the alternative of it having some non-status-quo (i.e. overtly noticeable) political/ideological message.
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