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Post by jdredd on May 9, 2015 1:11:08 GMT -5
www.cnn.com/2015/05/08/opinions/yang-joss-whedon-feminism/index.html"Whatever the truth behind Whedon's decision to sign off of social media, the still-raging debate does highlight serious questions around the endemic sexism of the superhero canon, which is now an immensely lucrative and increasingly influential pillar of popular culture. The treatment of Black Widow in "Age of Ultron" was cringeworthy. But it's just a tree in a forest of anti-feminism. Female superheroes still get short shrift in the world of TV and cinema -- long after Superman and Batman have been remade multiple times, a Wonder Woman movie is just now getting off the ground and targeted at 2017. Marvel won't launch a film centered on a female hero until 2018, when "Captain Marvel" finally takes flight. A leaked email from Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter suggested a reason why: The history of female superhero movies has been financially disastrous." I must confess, I am a long-time member of Nerd Culture, a subset of Consumer Culture, the dominating culture of the West. And Nerd Culture was mostly a male thing in the beginning. We can argue how much it has changed or not changed in the past couple of decades, but it does sell a lot of movie tickets. TV, of course, is dominated by Sports Culture. But Sports Culture is dominated by males as much as, or even more than, Nerd Culture, isn't it? As for the adversaries of Consumer Culture, Islamic Culture is far behind in it's treatment of women.
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Post by jdredd on May 13, 2015 2:11:32 GMT -5
Does cultural stagnation and political stagnation run parallel? The Conservatives in England remain in power, on a platform of cutting welfare and immigration and taxes, just what the Middle Class likes. And in the US, we could have Bush vs. Clinton in 2016. Heck, Bush I was elected 27 years ago in 1988, and Bush III could be in office until 2024. Yikes!
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Post by jdredd on Jun 6, 2015 22:32:18 GMT -5
On the cover of this month's National Geographic there is a headline "Weed, the new science of marijuana". Of course, this would never have happened twenty years ago. What changed? Well, for one thing the Greatest Generation, which had a phobia about pot for some reason, is now mostly extinct, and portion of the Boomers who emulated them are getting less and less. So it seems the real mover of cultural change is probably death. Slowly as in the fading away of the Boomers or quickly as in the carnage of WWI. I have always thought that the Soviet Union collapsed because Russia's Greatest Generation who fought the Great Patriotic War passed away.
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Post by jdredd on Jun 20, 2015 2:09:18 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/article/420010/nietzschean-concept-explains-todays-pc-culture-jonah-goldberg"The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language, resented their plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to launch a real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality and rendering them evil in the popular imagination. Wrote Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals: It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to the inversion with their teeth . . ., saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God . . .” But if the Jewish prophets introduced the idea that success in this world was a sign of corruption and evil, the Christians perfected it, according to Nietzsche. “Christianity,” he wrote, “was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.” I get excited when anyone quotes Nietzsche, but this could explain a lot of where the right comes from. So it's the "powerless" (have nots) who resorted to "assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality" (as if the haves had some monopoly on those). Is that what the right wants to do, bring back Feudalism? Who knew?
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Post by jdredd on Jun 27, 2015 21:21:31 GMT -5
I suppose it might seem like a "sudden" cultural switch to acceptance of gay marriage to some, but with the people I know it was "what took so long?". Was it just that most of the old bigoted farts (Scalia) have dropped dead? I also wonder why the right, who is so gung-ho anti-Islam, is not cheering the Supreme Court decision too. What better way, even better than the almost random bomb dropping we're doing, to say "In your face, assholes!" to the ISIS types than saying gay marriage is a right?
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Post by jdredd on Jul 17, 2015 3:53:31 GMT -5
www.cnn.com/2015/07/16/entertainment/feat-amy-smer-star-wars-gq/index.html"(CNN)After winning fans around the world with her comedy, Amy Smer has turned her attention to a galaxy far, far away. And, in typical Smer-style, her saucy spin is drawing attention. The cover of the new issue of GQ features Smer dressed as Princess Leia in a "Return of the Jedi" bikini top, sucking on C-3PO's finger. A photo spread inside the magazine has more "Star Wars"-themed scenes, including one of Smer topless in bed, smoking a cigarette between C-3PO and his droid friend R2-D2." Who is Amy Shumer and why is she sucking off geek culture? I guess my age is showing. But I'm sure this will win the hearts and minds of young Muslims. Hey, give up Allah and you get a skanky comedienne sucking a fake robot finger!
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Post by jdredd on Jul 30, 2015 19:00:04 GMT -5
thefederalist.com/2015/07/29/how-i-realized-im-a-conservative/"I was sure that I was on the side of good, but I still had a feeling of unease. I would read books like J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan,” expecting the illuminating awakenings my friends professed, but the books always fell flat. I just didn’t get it. I wondered what was wrong with me. It turns out that there was little to get. The books were crap. But I also read the theology of C.S. Lewis and George McDonald, the fiction of Ayn Rand and Elizabeth Gouge, the classics like “The Histories” by Herodotus, “Confessions” by Augustine, and the philosophies and plays of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. And my faith was strong; it was a constant, and I went through bouts of rch-going that irritated my liberal friends to no end. They actually said to me, “How can someone as intelligent as you believe in nonsense like that, especially Catholic dogma?” Ironically, they believed in runes, tarot cards, psychics, the supernatural, séances, auras, and every other idiot mystical fad that came around." "I started to see that liberal policies rewarded poor choices, while penalizing those who worked hard, didn’t get pregnant as a teen, and were responsible for taking care of oneself. It really ticked me off. Little by little, I was starting to see that liberalism was hypocritical and destructive while conservatism actually promoted individual freedom, self-reliance, laws applied equally and fairly to each individual, and limited government. These were ideas I thought liberals, particularly hippie-type liberals, actually believed. I was mistaken." "So many Americans in this country are liberal and Democrat just because that is what they have always been, and this political stance is presented as the only intelligent and humane stance one can have—but they don’t live life like liberals. They are for family and against abortion, they want jobs, not handouts, they believe that capital punishment is sometimes necessary, they want to have the right to own guns to protect their family, and they want government out of their schools, rches, and homes. If we can get them to see, they too will not be able to un-see, and we might just restore America." This is such a stereotypical conversion story of a Baby Boomer going from a liberal to conservative. Most of them seem to have happened in the Reagan years, when The Gipper's popularity made it hard to be a liberal and still "fit in". And sure, "Catcher in the Rye" sucked, "On the Road" was mostly a guy thing, and "The Teachings of Don Juan" were supernatural hokum. But that doesn't make any of Ayn Rand's fiction anything but crap, either, not to mention C.S. Lewis's wimpy theology. And of course, this lady took the road of saying she didn't make the bad choices those other folks made, and why should she have to pay for their mistakes? Very Reaganesque. Before Reagan, most people would say "There but for the grace of God" when seeing a down and out person. So this lady, like lots of Boomers, is pining for an imaginary limited government wonderland, their idea of a "restored" America. Sorry, Dana, we can only go forward, not back. The white suburban dream of the 80's is over.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 9, 2015 0:52:10 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/article/423653/west-dead-yet"At least for now, we are in a cycle of Western decline, waiting either for another rchill, Thatcher, or Reagan to scold us out of it — or for an existential enemy, foreign or domestic, of such power and danger that all our progressive pieties will dissipate in the face of danger. If, God forbid, Putin moves into the Baltic states, if Iran launches a nuke into Israel, if North Korea shoots chemical shells into Seoul, if China absorbs Taiwan, if, in another 9/11, a dozen 757s take down the Sears Tower, if the interest rate on a soon-to-be-$20-trillion national debt hits 7 percent, if Social Security checks start to bounce, or if Wall Street trumps its 2008 implosion, then Miley Cyrus will go the way of Britney Spears, Barack Obama the way of Jimmy Carter, and Black Lives Matter the way of It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand. Then the televised presences of Caitlin Jenner and the Kardashians would vanish as the decadent indulgences of a society that could no longer afford them. Bounty to boredom to decadence to panic to reawakening to ascendance has always been the cyclical way of the West. Its curse has been that the cycles of nihilism are as long as they are unnecessary." The National Review sends it's head geopolitical guy to take on the "Decline of the West". His grasp of popular culture seems a bit weak, though (and mine isn't?). Still, he points out the parallel between cultural stagnation and political stagnation, which we have plenty of. His saviors are, of course, new rchills, Thatchers, and Reagans. How about Trump? I was speculating that a Trump Presidency might possibly wake up the complacent Millennials. Might they take to the streets in an Occupy Wall Street times a thousand if the Congress is in the hands of the GOP and Trump is in the WH? Probably not, but one can always hope. I can certainly remember when Revolution was part of the culture of many young people, at least before Disco came along. Talk about nihilism.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 14, 2015 16:42:19 GMT -5
I'm more and more thinking cultural and political stagnation go hand in hand. The last cultural upheaval in the late sixties (short-lived, unfortunately) had both a cultural and political aspect. The Status Quo is stagnation, possibly? Is that a big DUH?
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Post by jdredd on Sept 16, 2015 4:41:51 GMT -5
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150911-toronto-review-is-michael-moores-where-to-invade-next-any-good"The title of Where to Invade Next, the new Moore documentary that opened the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday, makes it sound as if Moore is taking a swipe at post-9/11 attempts by the US to police the world. But that title is deceptive; the movie isn’ta jokey riff on military colonialism. Its central gambit is that Moore himself ‘invades’ one by one a dozen countries in Europe, Scandinavia and North Africa, looking for examples of how things operate there so that he can ‘conquer’ those ways and bring them back to the US. Many of the ideas hinge on government policy – statutory holiday leave in Italy, the legalisation of drugs in Portugal – but what Moore is really looking at is less political than cultural. As portrayed in Where to Invade Next, these nations have based their way of doing things on a social contract: the belief that we’re all here to look out for each other. Moore is saying that the US used to think that way too, but that it no longer does, because the hands of its compassion have been tied by bureaucracy and greed. His message is that US citizens are now organised – by their leaders, their habits, maybe something in their hearts – so that they live life at each other’s throats." What I'm looking forward to more than the movie is the righties having to rip Moore to shreds once more. Also, I wonder if any Millennials are Micheal Moore fans? He is a geezer like me. Also, the question is, isn't the cultural political? Right-wing dirtbag Breitbart (now sadly deceased )said "politics is downhill from culture". Was he right?
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Post by jdredd on Sept 29, 2015 22:27:28 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/article/424805/victim-culture-kills-american-manhood" I grew up in rural Kentucky, where the process of becoming a man meant gaining toughness, shedding weakness, and learning how to take care of yourself and others. This was simply understood, not just by fathers and sons but also by mothers and teachers. In one grade-school incident, I got into a playground fight with another boy and knocked him to the ground. As the teacher rushed up to separate us, she demanded to know what happened. “He said I hit like a girl,” I told her. “Is this true?” She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. “Well then, you deserved it,” she said. And that was that." I thought of that minor playground scrap — and many others like it — when reading through Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s brilliant new paper, “Microaggression and Moral Culture.” Campbell and Manning contend that we’re in the midst of a key cultural change. "Raising boys to be whiny victims isn’t exactly new. When I first moved to the Northeast in the mid-1990s I noticed that many of the boys raised by the liberal elite weren’t “men” in any sense I could recognize. They were whiny, petulant, hypersensitive, and incapable of either physical self-defense or even the most rudimentary tasks of manual labor. I thought they were so self-evidently off-putting that their cultural influence would be limited. I was wrong." Speaking of comedy, here is a rightie whining about America raising "whiny" men. He can't understand why boys in the Northeast aren't raised like boys in the boonies of Kentucky. I think he's right, we just don't have enough fistfights in schools anymore. But I'm sure he will turn around and call Union members "thugs" tomorrow.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 3, 2015 11:45:13 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/article/425026/walking-dead-zombie-fiction-conservativeWhen liberals watch the government collapse, they’re watching with their last trip to the DMV in mind, or their frustrating encounters with public schools, or — heaven forbid — any form of contact with the Department of Veterans Affairs. When they watch the utopias burn, they’re seeing the will to power in their own colleagues, the way that even like-minded people will so quickly turn on all but their closest friends (and sometimes even their closest friends) when they sense the possibility of personal advantage. When they roll their eyes at characters who can’t or won’t use guns, they’re . . . well, then they’re just using common sense. Even the editorial board of the Village Voice knows you don’t walk through a zombie herd without an assault rifle and — yes — a high-capacity magazine. It is said that the facts of life are conservative. And so are the facts of fiction — especially zombie fiction. So, if you can handle the gore, watch The Walking Dead unreservedly. You’ll find that its diverse cast is governed by an unseen code: Live by conservatism, die by liberalism, and the only way you give up your Smith & Wesson is if someone pries it from your rotting, zombified hand. Here's one of NR's culture warriors taking a shot at explaining the popularity of The Walking Dead. He might be right, who knows? Yes, like war, guns are fun. Of course, I could try to make the connection between gunning down zombies on TV and alienated young men gunning down fellow students on campus, but then I would be as droll as conservatives. Personally, I prefer vampires. They are intelligent and sexy and guns don't kill them, unlike conservatives. JUST KIDDING!!!
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Post by jdredd on Oct 12, 2015 22:58:30 GMT -5
One of the big changes that has happened in the last 40 years was the rise of Sci Fi/Superhero themes. When I was growing up, the big deal on the silver screen and TV was cowboys, cowboys, cowboys. The "Greatest Generation" loved cowboys. Of course I was a fan of the up and coming SciFi genre, with great movies like "Forbidden Planet", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", and "Godzilla". It was "Star Wars" that marked the major milestone in the demise of cowboys and ushered in our present cinema culture IMHO. Now the big money makers are sci-fi plus stuff like "Fast and Furious" also making some bucks. So this December "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" debuts, the first Star Wars made with Disney money. Of course, there is always the chance it will bomb, not much of a chance IMO, but a chance. Maybe the whole Space Adventure theme has worn out it's welcome, but I doubt it. What could take its place? The so-called "adult" movies like the lame "Still Alice" or "Nebraska" don't seem to have what it takes, that's for sure. All this is from an aging boomer, of course, so who knows what the Millennials will like when they get older, or the generation after the Millennials, whatever they are called.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 13, 2015 10:28:46 GMT -5
It's sad when you look at a post like the last one I did here and it seems tired and repetitive. It's as dull as a Jonah Goldberg column. Perhaps the real stagnation is going on inside my head.
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Post by jdredd on Dec 4, 2015 16:59:53 GMT -5
Perhaps culture in America is not stagnating as much as being on autopilot. Could that be because our culture is now being directed by Megacorporations like Disney?
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