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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]

Can you do too much noticing?

Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.

I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?

In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?

One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".

Its not Noticing when the writers state their worldview upfront. You pointed out the two young leads as white and black, yes, but the last lead is a white man... who in the very first scene of the show has his black daughter front and center with him.

It is obvious to Hollywood that there is a deliberate attempt from inside the house to promote blackness, but it is more about reputation laundering than encouraging women to seek black men (dogfart does far more work on that front).

The real dissonance stems from the incongruity of blacks occupying primarily high status and competence positions in modern hollywood portrayals when doing a single Google search on a Name when crime is committed in real life shows where the true disparity lies.

You know, I can acknowledge that the pattern you're seeing exists, but I've never taken that much umbrage at it, probably because I mostly limit my content to older, or really highly reviewed stuff. Similar, to the question of whether the demographics of the cast need to match the source material. But I did come across an instance of it recently that bothered me a little, and felt notable.

I really enjoyed Masters of the Air: it was really excellent on most of the axes I care about -- screenwriting, visuals, acting, and such. But at one point, during an ensemble shot of the American air crews, I thought to myself "those guys all look British," so I looked into it on IMDB -- most of the main cast are British or Irish. Even the Tuskegee Airmen weren't played by African-American actors. Some of that might have been due to pandemic restrictions, or using local actors for logistical reasons, but it felt off. Not that there aren't lots of Americans of such descent, but a group of (white, 1940s) Americans should look more diverse than that: I had a [redacted] whose family had recently immigrated from [Europe, not Britain] that served and died in a B-24 over Germany.

Maybe it's that it's intended as a historical account, but it feels like it cheapens the narrative ("heroic American airmen bring the fight to Nazi Germany"), and it's not as if the British weren't there and similarly heroic at the time. A similar series portraying RAF Bomber Command would probably be pretty interesting!

That said, I would recommend the series overall as a worthy followup to Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.

To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.

I highly recommend Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" if you want to see a british ww2 movie.

To Americans, WWI is definitely seen as a second-rate prequel to the war that actually matters, but I get the impression that for Brits, the Great War still looms large, with WWII seen as a devastating but still far less psychologically damaging sequel. If I’m right about that, it probably explains why there aren’t (m)any British WWII movies.

There are many British WWII movies. I assure you. Many many.

I've only ever seen consternation over black British actors playing black Americans, obviously because there's a weird protectionist sensibility over that turf. Nobody was ever giving Christian Bale or Benedict Cumberbatch shit for their American accents. At most, we chuckle a little bit when the accents slip at some of the corners (for some reason the hard pronunciation of 'are' is often a giveaway to me), but we just take it for granted that the British are born with thespian genetics.

The white woman/black man "pairing" as you put it is not, as far as I am aware, a particularly new concept, though you may be correct in suggesting it has not long been mainstream in terms of characters in film (or games, or whatever, though I am out of my element there.)* In other words, while I do not deny that there may be propagandistic moves made by popular media in the service of progressive goals, and that often these moves are ham-fisted and disrupt story narrative, this does not seem like such an example to me. I agree with @Gillitrut in this regard, unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)

*Edit: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released in 1967 and was presumably a shocker then.

When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.

The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.

Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.

The relevant point is that this appears to be widespread, and I apparently, to echo the OP's post title haven't noticed, but then I see about 85% Asian (Japanese, more Korean now than previously) in my print ads, my commercials, my news, my tv shows, the Youtubers my sons watch. My consumption of media is probably, compared to that of most here, therefore skewed, or at least not the usual. Thus my reaction.

unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)

You know, it sure is harder to take this posture of good-natured misunderstanding at face value after you have explained your situation as a minority father of mixed race children in a country with very exclusionary culture. For you, normalization of miscegenation – whatever else goes in the package – feels necessary, so you will be obnoxiously obtuse, to the point that your rhetorics would've amounted to social violence, were your opponent not anonymous*. «Oh dear me, so do you think there is something… wrong when people of different races join hands in Marriage? Aren't we all God's creatures with inherent value? Huh. So strange, so cruel. But to each his own!».

No (in case this has to be spelled out again): it's more about the hamfisted erasure of the representation of the most typical and normative pairing, and the campaign to code the Blacked.com** image of relationships as the default, whereas in reality it's a distinctly less prestigious and healthy pattern. This is what the producers have in mind, this is what they want the viewers to have in mind, this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.

*I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.

**one more "clever" status-preserving maneuver here is to say, for instance, «pardon me, I do not know what you are talking about… oh», and derail the topic into sneering insinuations about racist chuds watching interracial porn. It's a pretty transparent and pathetic development. As I've been warned for baiting people into petty comebacks, I'm stating this to avoid such a development. But neither can I be assed to put this in some other way.

this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.

Well, when we have the western white right wing on a complete hair trigger to the point where using a stock photo of a Muslima is enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally you do start to wonder where else they may be hallucinating about Chinese Robbers in commericals.

  • -17

Suppose we reverse stock photos in this picture.

Does it look like a snide suggestion that immigrants struggle with learning English?

Fair point yes it does.

I guess I should be thankful that Twitter doesn’t display replies to us accountless peasants.

Anyway, this feels like a bit of a non sequitur. What’s Dase got to do with Great Value brand Klansmen?

enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally

Where is that something, do you just mean the responses under the the tweet in your link? The pinned tweet on that account, while recent, makes me suspect the shitposting crowd was antagonized before already.

Yeah, just the responses under that tweet.

This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.

I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:

I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.

are unacceptable.

You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.

I explained once.

Dase explained again.

George E could have read my post where I explained exactly what the problem was, but he understood the whole time.

I didn't respond to Gillitrut because I foresaw the same blind-or-lying dilemma and chose not to engage in hopeless conversation. I'm glad someone else said what I wanted to.

Yo, since you're calling me out: A) What post are you talking about where you "explained what the problem was"? I didn't see it or read it. Perhaps you're right that I could have or even should have. I didn't. You're assuming.

You're apparently pattern-matching me to someone who denies there's a problem with media. I do not deny this, as my post history indicates.

The initial post by @FaibleEstimeDeSoi was about video games and a black/white pairing, which didn't and still does not strike me as odd. The issue is not with one game. The issue is larger, as with the tide that goes out--it lowers all boats. For whatever reason I did not make that connection to the post and I felt the issue was with the interracial pairing in and of itself, not a symptom of a larger issue (i.e. focusing on one boat instead of the tide.)

Dase decided to go for it and get personal. That's what I take issue with--well, that and his general writing style, which I find tedious but not because I think he's a liar or cretin. I don't think either of those and he seems quite intelligent. He was also rude and thus far in his interactions with me does not seem to be interested in changing that tack. So be it.

I'm not blind and I'm not lying. I spent three years in Africa and most of my life in Alabama--black men with white women is a thing. That is the issue I was bringing up. I am not Gillitrut.

(Edit: I'm probably one of the most normie dudes in here and need to adjust my expectations. Absurd really how thin my skin is at my age.)

Dase, what happened? You seem much more bitter lately.

That's how ascension to a self-made Chad looks like

I mean, the key attribute here is the monotony of it. As he notes, n=1 isn't really enough to say much because the pairing is not exactly unknown. It takes a good memory, a reasonable amount of exposure to modern Western media, and some level of political awareness to, as you put it, "notice". Most people don't have that. TheMotte concentrates those who do, but it's still not everyone here.

As it happens, @George_E_Hale has just admitted that he's not exposed to all that much of this.

Some charity would be nice. Even a reasonable amount of SJers haven't noticed this sort of thing; I didn't until somewhat after I left.

Charity is in order, but I think it's fair to say that George's comment is very easy to read as sarcastic and strawmannish, even if that was unintentional.

I'm honestly not sure where your apparent hostility is coming from here. Obnoxiously obtuse? Jesus. I wrote a pretty benign comment that I didn't see how having a couple of characters where one was a white woman and the other a black man was in some way propaganda or odd. Were this everywhere, in every episode and story and book and TV show, sure it would be notably odd. Also, if this were a game made in Japan for Japanese people (a country where as you say I do live) I'd see it as a bit odd. The fact of the matter is, however, in the US and elsewhere (presumably the primary market for this game, Fallout, though I admittedly do not know and am assuming) these types of pairings do happen and have happened. It's not as if the characters are a trans woman and a gay man somehow finding love, where I'd think there'd be more of a point to be made.

While we're at it, your link to the tweet about IQs strikes me as dubious. Mankind Quarterly? Forgive me if I don't immediately rush out and subscribe. And hauling in the other ideas of propaganda re: girlbosses and dumb males (where I see the point, and agree) seems disingenuous of you. When I've read your comments elsewhere dealing with others you've seemed both better reasoned and more polite.

It's true I don't use terms like "miscegenation" and to me it's not something I give much thought to. I probably should assume that there is at least a certain number of posters on the Motte who think I'm dirtying the gene pool (presumably of the Japanese). It's a bit close to home for me to feel like having that conversation, however.

Barring that, however, normally, as people do on this forum, I'd be interested in discussing the topic with you. But as you're now suggesting I'm a liar and probably a cretin, you're probably right that conversation is hopeless.

Your use of scare quotes struck me as snarky, and you very much did not understand or failed to address the argument being made, which was entirely about a pattern of behavior and the disproportionate representation. The hostility was, I think, a perception that you rather deliberately missed the point.

Very first post I made here was on a related topic . I'm not blind to the idea of this propagandistic swing in media, not am I its defender in some sort of fair-is-fair way. I won't say "the way OP presented the point" because I seem to be the only one who misconstrued, rather "the way I took it" was a focus on one affair as a plot device that happened to be between a black man and white woman. That this has become a widely-played trope I have not myself perceived but I chalk that up to a certain isolation (obviously I don't live in a hole so not complete isolation). Mea culpa.

You may be right that this, along with my use of quotes, fired up a reaction. But so what? Part of the ethos here at least by my understanding is that we suppress the heat and aim for light, or at the very least keep it non-personal. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off despite suspicions otherwise, certainly not OP, who had the humility even to doubt whether his post was low effort (I think it was perfectly fine). Even here you've very clearly explained to me the issue with civility. In any case I've let this irk me way more than it's worth. Thank you for your input.

What's more embarrassing, watching Blackeddotcom or watching Hollywood movies and commercials?

That's a joke. But here's my point: I have an adblock, and I don't watch movies unless I expect to like them. And I don't watch many movies in theaters. It's not that I avoid movies with interracial couples or whatever, it's just that I haven't been watching many movies lately. As such, I am to a large extent not exposed to the phenomenon you're describing.

The downsides of eschewing pop culture exist but aren't enormous the way that the downsides of eschewing/being shunned from other stuff are. Pop culture is a pretty small part of culture. The more people read non-pop culture the more powerful it will be and the less powerful corporate dreck will be. That's something I think the right and the left can agree on.

I mainly keep up with Western media through second-hand complaints these days. I am well aware it's more of a religious and educational institution than an entertainment-focused one.

It is a pity. As a kid, I liked consuming American cartoons and such. Now it just doesn't click, the sermonizing is too pervasive and too easy to notice.

Loved Pantheon S2 though. Maybe "Hollywood" should try adapting more content of Chinese authors. It feels fresh, original and open-minded.

The white woman/black man "pairing" as you put it is not, as far as I am aware, a particularly new concept

That this is the most common or ideal pairing is definitely a new concept.

I would be willing to bet that the most common romantic pairing in American media is still white man/white woman, followed by white man/ethnically ambiguous but relatively pale skinned woman (e.g. Andy Samberg/Melissa Fumero).

Right, but you wouldn't know this from mass media, which misrepresents this reality to a fairly extreme degree.

Sure, but has anyone suggested that this is the most common or ideal pairing?

I feel like two or three years ago it became weirdly ubiquitous in advertising. I don't really stay up to date with TV so I couldn't comment on that.

It may be that because of my physical distance from US advertising (I don't really have US commercials, do not see print ads or whatever is on billboards, etc.) I am out of touch to a degree on what is or isn't common in English language advertising.

See my answer to him. But also I aren't in anyway shape or form against interracial or even any form of marriage at all. It is jarring to me because it's most likely the sign of ideology that I disagree with. Like maybe this soviet movie about Russian Empire is overtly highly critical of it because it was personal opinion of the filmmaker, but most likely it's because he is a card carrying communist(or it was the censors mandate, but happily US isn't a totalitarian state and it's not on the way there).

My humble opinion is that they (the wokies et al) notice, and they will continue and double down and berate you if you point at it at all. They simply don't care if you watch or not, its their vanity project, but that is ok because they are making it better for their people (hint: not you). They are the middle management, the marketing people and the danger hairs with liberal arts degrees.

So far they have been getting their way because they were propped up by pension funds like Black Rock and Vanguard, but now that there have been significant outflows of capital there have been some purges, but it won't be enough. Looking for example at Hollywood, the writers guild's strike looks to have been successful in getting concessions from the studios (chaperoned AI [meaning, AI can only be used by the writers themselves, not the studios to replace writers] and a minimum number of writers in each writer's room of 5 I think).

Battlefields I have seen:

Hollywood
Videogames
Tabletop Games (W40K)
Novels (Nebula award)
Localization of Japanese Entertainment
Gundam Model Kits (This one I think is more a product of the imagination of the antiwoke people, as yuri is an staple of Anime/Manga)

CoC's in Software Dev Projects (This plus the ousting of Linus)
The push for Woke language in programming (example: the Master/slave controversy of a few years)

Marketing in general (Always mixed race or minority pairings, sometimes ads not even related to the product but for the purpose of browbeating their core demographics, the Budlight fiasco, the Gillete ad of "boys will be boys")

The point of it is trying to change the culture from the middle down (remember they are the middle managers and their minions, while some CEO's are probably true believers like the Ice Cream dudes Ben & Jerry, the majority are only looking up to enrich themselves and their cronies like with Bobby Kotick), and if you have any objection it just means you are an enemy and your opinion doesn't matter to them. Just look at the bruhaha that is happening right now with the female Custodes or the Blowback the Lovely Complex Localizer got for giving ammunition to their critics when he went mask off.

Tabletop Games (W40K)

Assuming this is a racial issue: Shouldn't a true to the setting depiction of 40K be full of POCs? If anything it's weird that all of mankind 10s of thousands of years in the future produces mostly white guardsmen and space marines, given their depiction in various media.

the main conflict in W40K right now is female Custodes and female space marines. Black people was more an issue in D&D where the racists insisted that orcs were representation of African Americans.

But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue.

Females custodes is a change. I'm not sure I'd denounce it as wokeness.

"But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue." is the "it's just a couple of kids in college campuses,..." of tabletop. Anyone paying attention to the hobby culture wars already knows what is the next step, especially after the "Warhammer is for everyone" message.

But no. They aren't doing it. Not every slope is slippery all the way down.

What reason do you have to say that they aren't going to do it?

It's the eternal contradiction of
"this is a satire of evil fascism and all the characters are evil white fascists, chuds can't media literacy!"
vs
"Representation matters! More queer trans space marines of colour stomping the faces of screaming children who misgendered us!"

You didn't mention comics, they've literally murdered that industry by squandering everything of value to push a message. Right now StoneToss gets more views per comic than mainstream marvel comics franchises.

yeah, I forgot about it. Comics gate was so long ago I just remembered it now.

Comic book media for sure.

  • John Stewart (Green Lantern) and Shayera Hol (Hawkgirl) have a child (Rex Stewart aka Warhawk) in Justice League Unlimited.
  • Luke Cage and Jessica Jones have a child (Danielle Cage) via affair when Jessica Jones was dating Scott Lang (Ant-Man). Danielle Cage becomes Captain America for a stretch.
  • Kara Zor-EL/Karen Starr (Supergirl/Power Girl) is in a sexual relationship with Mr. Terrific and later a romantic relationship with Val-Zod (Superman) in The New 52.
  • (Black) Jimmy Olsen is in a love triangle with Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) in Supergirl television show.
  • Miles Morales (Spider-Man) and Gwen Stacey (Spider-Gwen) have romantic feelings for each other. Justifying it, by saying that it's an alternate dimension Gwen Stacey.

Black men taking formerly white men's superhero mantles and banging white women.

I've stopped paying close attention to any comic book media.

One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem.

I don't think most people think "white woman protagonist with black man love interest" is "propaganda." Like, propaganda for what? Would it be propaganda if they were both white? If it was an asian woman and a white man? What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

Like anything interracial pairing can be a propaganda or not depending on the context. In the American context there is widespread effort to reduce prevalence of white men in media with the goal of representation and making viewers less racist(in the vein of studies that showed that growing up in more diverse schools leads to being more inclusive). You can of course expect interracial pairs in US media without this factor, America is racially diverse and there are quite many interracial unions, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. I didn't write this in the OP because I thought that here most of the people already know about this.

Was it bad when whites and white men were over-represented in media? Did that make it difficult for you to enjoy a piece of media?

  • -16

Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.

There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.

If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.

So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.

I wasn't knowledgeable about US to have an opinion about it when this was true. And I think that the latest part of that period was color blind enough to be just the result of fair hiring practice. But for example native Russian minorities being almost non-existent in Russian media apart from a selected few does bothers me.

Like, propaganda for what?

Miscegenation and racial admixture, of course.

Would it be propaganda if they were both white?

Obviously not.

If it was an asian woman and a white man?

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

There isn't one. This is about race.

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

I don't see how this is true. According to PEW (as of 2017) 11% of interracial relationships in the US were white/black compared to 15% that are white/asian. Black men are twice as likely to have a white spouse as black women, while about 50% more asian women have a white spouse compared to asian men. That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

Obviously not.

Why not? Surely it would be propaganda against race-mixing then.

That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

It's huge when you consider the relative proportions of Black vs Asian people in the US.

According to the US census there are 41M black people in the US compared to 20M asians. I'm highly skeptical there are more white men married to asian women than black men married to white women.

  • -10

Well, there are according to your own immediately previous post, about 28% more WM/AW than BM/WW with no particular reason to think the flipped-gender versions would balance that out. This seems to roughly match my own observations for the tiny, potentially biased bit that's worth. The numbers and the way they were arrived at have a lot of room for rounding errors but not enough to cancel out or reverse the conclusion they'd lead you to.

The black male/white female divorce rate is astronomically higher than any other pairing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183451/

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality. If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

Just have to say that is awesome and I will have to remember it.

What shows or stories are obliged to change their casting decisions in response to other shows casting decisions?

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

This works in the context of a particular series. I am not sure it works in the context of many different sets of writers on many different series.

  • -13

By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?

Sure, but the degree of portrayal of interracial couples in media is not anywhere near that density.

  • -13

I believe the contention is that it in fact is near that density. It certainly is much, much higher than observed reality.

My main noting of Current Year elements of Fallout has been the lack of tits. The only sexuality in the show so far was a full-body above-the-dick male shot. Because if there was a hint of something a heterosexual man might enjoy, someone somewhere would have complained.

Otherwise, good so far.

They have a whole bunch of tits out in one scene in the second half of the season. The scene didn’t really make all the much sense imo, but there sure were a whole lot of titties out. They were all extras though, the FMC keeps her top on.

I find this satisfactory, the MC isn't a Girlboss and the black guy is more morally ambiguous than people of color are typically allowed to be. It's just good.

I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me

It's plenty high effort enough. One to two paragraphs is fine for a top level post. Some people like to go on longer but you don't have to.

Not only that, I'd really like to encourage people that have a quick point to just go ahead and post it. You don't need a thesis, just a topic of interest and an opinion with at least some degree of reasoning or fact to back it. If you think it's good or bad that SCOTUS has declined to hear the Deray Mckesson case, you can say so without needing to spend all that long on the matter, for example. People will fill in the details and do their own homework if it's an interesting topic.

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