Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
Well… you’re right about white, American, and not bald! Sadly you struck out on the rest. Although I’m intrigued by that last part. Hopefully at some point in my life I’ll make you right about that!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
I can’t resist the temptation. Do me do me do me!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
You probably know he's hugely popular
Yeah, I definitely wanted this to be my bridge back into the genre, and had heard a lot of great things about it. I agree that the characterizations are dicey at times and that much of the dialogue writing is awful. I find the cosmology interesting, though, and I admit I’m a sucker for the “here’s a list of factions with distinct personality traits and iconography, sort yourself into the one that you’d be a part of” trope.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
I have not read any of his other stuff (I read a lot of fantasy literature in middle school and high school, but took a very long break from the genre) so I have no preconceived notions.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
Oh good. The worst parts of the books so far have l been Sanderson’s various pathetic attempts at insult humor, which he apparently considers the height of wit, and that entire mini-arc brought out the nadir of it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
I just started Oathbringer, the third novel in the Stormlight Archive series. I really enjoyed the second half of The Way Of Kings and the first two-thirds of Words Of Radiance, but I found the
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
I really appreciate this comment, because it reveals that I have put too much trust in commentators who are either extrapolating from incomplete information, or simply grasping at straws. I should have used more humility before speaking confidently regarding a topic about which I lacked sufficient direct knowledge!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
No. You are still missing the point I was trying to make. By all means, perhaps it matters that the characters are white. My argument is that (the pro-race-blind-casting position is that) it shouldn't matter if a character who is theoretically white within the story is played by an actor who is visibly black.
Buddy… appearance is part of acting. One uses one’s physical body to portray actions, emotion, intent, etc. This is also why we use costuming and make-up to alter actors’ appearances to better fit the story we’re attempting to tell. The hypothetical “steel-manned pro-race-blind-casting advocate” would readily acknowledge the absurdity of making a Pride and Prejudice film in which one of the actors (and only one) decided to wear a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and cargo shorts while the rest of the actors wore period clothing. The only artistically-defensible reason to do so is if one were trying to make some sort of meta-commentary. And sure, I could definitely imagine an artfully-done version of this, intentionally poking at the conventions of filmmaking and storytelling, forcing audiences to confront their own expectations, etc. That’s its own genre, though, and is obviously very distinct from genres in which verisimilitude is valued and important.
What you’re failing to grapple with is the distinct expectations that separate different genres. The Muppets can get away with what they do because they’re in a specific genre in which verisimilitude does not, and cannot, exist as an expectation. There are no real-world analogues for talking frogs and green furry guys who live in trash cans. The conventions of the genre have specific demands and expectations, and the audience is already bought into them. What you’re now asking audiences to do is alter their expectations such that all genres throw out previous expectations of visual verisimilitude, and adopt ones closer to madcap puppet comedy. And you don’t seem to have a coherent artistic reason why, since you don’t seem to have properly internalized why so many genres had that expectation in the first place.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
and to make fewer snide comments about the apparent population genetics of the Ring of Powers Shire being implausible, which is, again, missing the point on a level with complaining that a Muppet doesn't look like a real barnyard animal.
You have chosen an especially poor example with Rings Of Power, because it belies either an ignorance about the purpose behind Tolkien’s work, or else an intentional disregard for it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. (And, by extension, the Celtic and North Germanic peoples of Continental Europe.) Gondor as a rough analogue for Roman-Celtic Britain, Rohan as the horse-obsessed Anglo-Saxons, Elves as the remnants of the pre-Aryan Neolithic peoples, etc. To the extent that this matters to you, it should matter that the actors involved at least plausibly physically resemble somebody belonging to, or descending from, those peoples. It matters that they’re white in a way that it doesn’t matter if the actors in a Star Wars film are white.
You dodged Nybbler’s pretty incisive point about a non-black actor playing a historically black individual. If a director set out to make a Harriet Tubman biopic and chose to cast Saiorse Ronan in the title role, there is no amount of “she just really crushed the audition, and I’ve always wanted to work with her” that would suffice to excuse what would be (correctly) interpreted at a slap in the face to black Americans. They own Harriet Tubman’s legacy in a way that white people obviously don’t. She means something to them, it’s important for them to see themselves in her, and pretty much everybody understands that.
So then the question is, are white people allowed to own any historical figures or stories of their own? Is it right and fair for white British people, a great many of whom are directly descended from RAF pilots, to expect that a casting director honor the reality of what those men looked like, sounded like, etc.? Is it fair for Brits to want to see themselves reflected accurately on screen? What about their fictional/mythical but still important figures? King Arthur? Sherlock Holmes? Jeeves and Wooster? Mr. Darcy?
I expect that your answer might be, “Sure, but that doesn’t mean any individual casting director has any obligation to care about that.” But I don’t think you actually believe that. I think you recognize that there is an explicitly redistributive aspect to modern race-swapped casting. A desire to make up for past wrongs and throw a bone to non-white actors who’ve had a relatively rougher go of it than their white companions. Isn’t that why you would “encourage” directors to keep doing it if you had the power to do so?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
This is an astute observation, but I assume you can reason out what the result would be if an entire generation or two of Americans were raised only being exposed to the counterfactual reality presented in media, with no knowledge of our exposure to the mundane-but-not-telegenic underlying reality. They’d have an extremely skewed understanding of what the world is actually like.
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
This appears not to be happening at all, so far as I can tell. After a brief but abortive period of maybe a couple of weeks immediately following the election, in which it seemed like there might be some small but sincere effort toward this, progressives appear overwhelmingly to have hunkered down into a stance that they were right all along and that the voters really are just too irredeemable to ever be trusted again. Go on Bluesky and see how people who are perceived to be advocating “popularism” are treated. (You’re accused of throwing trans people and minorities to the wolves, betraying them for short-term mercenary political gain.)
A handful of smart-but-cynical elite figures like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein might be trying to conduct a proper course-correction, but they appear to have little or no influence on the tier of progressives thought leaders and activists just below them. Presumably television scriptwriters are on the tier even below that one, totally insulated from the imprecations of politically-savvy wonks.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter
Do you genuinely believe that the next mass shooter is reading The Motte? And if the answer is yes, do you believe that his opinions would not have been radicalized if not for having read racially-tinged comments on The Motte?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
"don't adopt a black kid, they're all bad, and they're ruining everything".
No, the actual claim is, “The specific black kids who are up for adoption/fostering in America are, to an extremely large extent, likely to be a huge problem.” They are not a randomly-selected cross-section of the overall black population. There is a reason why they are up for adoption, and it is nearly always a terrible reflection on the parents.
If you accept any sort of hereditarian explanation of human behavior, then it should matter to you that the kid you’re considering for adoption is very very very likely to be the child of A) a drug addict), B) an incarcerated person, or C) a teenage unwed mother. (Or the very common D) all of the above.) The same traits that led such a person to such a lowly state are likely to manifest at least to some extent in the child as well. Even if you don’t accept any hereditarian claims, you still have to worry about things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, childhood malnutrition, and even neglect/abuse leading to stunted cognitive/physical development, etc. Again, these things are not guaranteed to make the child a ticking time bomb, but the likelihood is far from zero.
These things are at least partially true of non-black children up for adoption or in the foster system as well, but to a markedly lesser extent. The likelihood of these problems just is higher when it comes to adopting a black child. That could change at some point down the road, and certainly there are numerous exceptions and success stories even today, but that doesn’t mean it’s immoral or misguided to take these things into account.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
I’m not disagreeing with any of that. I’m fully aware that the people I’m talking about start their instruments at a young age. That doesn’t mean they don’t still need a bunch more instruction and practice later on.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.
Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.
I had a summer job between my sophomore and junior years of high school. Your classic fast food job, working mostly with dudes 5+ years my senior. After that, though, as I started to get more serious about extracurricular, my parents encouraged me to quit in order to focus on schoolwork, summer reading assignments, summer band practice, etc. I also similarly had a job — this time a restaurant job — for over a year during college, which directly and negatively impacted my ability to participate in many of the projects which would have been very helpful for preparing my professional development in my chosen major.
I agree that these jobs were enriching in the sense that they forced me to develop time management, a thick skin when being given negative feedback or undesirable tasks, and an exposure to a broad cross-section of society. I further agree that many of the individuals at whom you’re taking aim would certainly have benefited considerably in the same way. I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
What sorts of things do you have in mind? As far as I’m aware, such things might include, for example, practicing an instrument. This strikes me as a great example of growth and learning, even if the logic motivating it (at least on the part of the parents) might be mostly mercenary.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Do you have an actual argument against his position? Or did it just make you feel icky?
I disagree with a great many of @WhiningCoil’s takes, and with the often bilious way he expresses them, but in this case his metaphor strikes me as a fairly reasonable (and certainly within the bounds of discussion) extension of the metaphor you yourself supplied.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes
What a weird description of Creed, of all the bands you could have picked. Their lyrics are very sincere (if not especially subtle) expressions of Scott Stapp’s Christian faith. They’re far more “soulful”, in terms of heartfelt expression of their true beliefs and emotions, than nearly any other band within their same broad genre. There are plenty of reasons not to like Creed (although I’m certainly a Creed fan), but lack of soulfulness is an inapt one.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
That’s not Eddie Murphy. It’s Nigerian-British actor Kayode Ewumi, portraying his character Roll Safe from the BBC series Hood Documentary.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
The people making these movies are not trying to impress you, the jaded 115+ IQ critical viewer who will pick apart the plot and complain about the action sequences. They’re much too busy optimizing their films for the international market, where their films will be eagerly lapped up by foreign audiences who’ll be watching them with subtitles. Those audiences are not especially concerned with the snappiness or verisimilitude of the dialogue, because they’re going to miss half of it anyway as they try to shift their eyes between the subtitles and the action taking place above them. (Or, if they’re watching a dubbed version instead, they’re just going to get localized, rewritten dialogue anyway, so the talent of the American scriptwriters is irrelevant.) These audiences want to see a bombastic series of visually-compelling sequences, populated by beautiful American celebrities; if they wanted to watch emotionally-stirring slice-of-life stories, they’d watch media made in their own countries.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
Okay, so, this is all a fairly decent summary, but all it demonstrates is that the Democrat-Republican split basically failed to map in any coherent way onto a liberal-conservative axis well into the 21st century. You’re correct that Bob Dole and Jerry Falwell would have been horrified if their daughter had been caught dating Dimebag Darrell Abbott; however, a good mainstream 90’s liberal like Phil Donahue would be equally horrified, because Dimebag was the kind of guy who proudly displayed Confederate imagery. (And, again, he’d be far more mortified by his daughter dating Phil Anselmo, especially after seeing this clip of Phil throwing a Roman and shouting “White power!”)
And hell, even if you want to stick to country music and you want to claim Jennings as a “liberal”, how about guys like Travis Tritt? An openly Republican Bush-voting conservative, who had long hair and a beard throughout the whole period you’re referring to? I don’t think Southern guys at the time would have thought Tritt looked out of place at a honky-tonk — let alone that he looked like a leftist academic.
Basically what I’m saying is that beards and long(ish) hair could pattern-match to “working-class Southern man who drinks a lot and doesn’t act like Ned Flanders, but who also doesn’t like faggots or egghead professors” just as easily as it could pattern-match to “ex-hippie with proper NPR-approved beliefs” during the time period OP referred to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
This seems like total nonsense to me. Maybe it’s just because I grew up immersed in the metalhead subculture, but I can think of a massive number of guys with beards and long hair from the 90’s and 00’s who were not remotely associated with academics or leftist politics. The guys from Pantera, for example, were all extremely working-class Southerners, and their politics ranged from generic tits-and-beer centrism (the Abbott brothers) to generic Southern conservatism (Rex Brown) to basically White Nationalism (Phil Anselmo).
I agree that they signaled “not a middle-class guy with a full-time white-collar job”, but past that I don’t think there was much of a political connotation at that time, nor even a couple of decades before that. (Nobody would have mistaken Waylon Jennings for a college professor either.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
When I was a kid in that actual era, I listened to a ton of music from the 80’s and 90’s, as well as contemporary music. I think that’s extremely normal and doesn’t say much about the quality of current music.
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