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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30072 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.

Right above it the report gives examples of staged or PR photos as a separate, but also bad, categories. If that's what they meant it was already covered.

Also,in my experience with Canadian ads, mixed race couples (especially with black people, who should be of much less relevance here) are very over-represented. I don't really see how it can be a coincidence at this point and not a result of the exact sentiment I'm seeing here, even if it isn't as badly or explicitly put. I think they just said the quiet part out loud this time.

Yeah I watched some big sporting event on a Canadian network and I had to google what percent of Canada is black. I follow the nba so I understand Canada has black immigrants but I didnt think they’d be in every car / insurance / beer ad during time outs

What little BBC I’ve watched seems to have a suspiciously high number of black people.

Pulling from an old post:

The BBC did do that ridiculous piece on a "typical" family in Roman Britain with a black Roman centurion. Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Then we have Stephen Moffat basically admitting to lying as a social engineering tactic. He's probably the most prominent person on the fiction side and apparently has first dibs on major British IP (Sherlock, Doctor Who, Jekyll, Dracula...) on that channel:

Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’”

It's past suspicious for me at this point.

I usually blame the US for everything wrong in the world but it may just be London's impact: half of Black Britons cluster in that area. People working there may just be exposed to disproportionate amounts of black people and react by doing stuff like this.

Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Her interactions with Taleb were how I was introduced to her work, so I was actually immensely shocked when I saw people treating her like a real academic or historian. I still don't think her work deserves any credibility, but I don't know if there's any amount of legitimate scholarship that can actually undo the corrosive effect that kind of politically motivated advocacy has on your reputation.

It's especially bad for someone who writes books for laymen.

If she was only involved in highly technical research about Roman numismatics or the climate of the early Roman Republic then it wouldn't be as bad both because the source material would be unlikely to be misinterpreted/misused and her audience of 400 specialists would have the immune system to deal with it.

Beard is one of those historians the rest of us are supposed to be able to trust and read without worrying she's a kook or going too far out on a limb. Except she just did. I like good pop history as much as anyone and she's a very common "safe" recommendation (especially if you want audiobooks) and it sucks cause I just don't trust her or want to hear from her. She seems respected for her actual scholarship, it's a shame this is how she advertised herself and spent her credibility.

"representation" is a basic requirement of every piece of media I make relating to characters. At the start, the art team defaulted to white characters, we have since been taught that every shot has at least one black character and one female. We instituted a skin-color randomizer to get more diversity, and then we instituted a skin-color-randomizer-override because randomness did not deliver the desired results.

Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.

I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.

Yeah they can fuck right off with that. I was wondering why I was getting randomly teabagged in a Battlefield V multiplayer game all the time, lo and behold I noticed it had randomed me as a black skinny chick. Fucking nonsense like this in world war 2 games should be straight up illegal.

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