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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator

So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.

The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.

The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.

That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.

According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.

It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.

That being said….

There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:

  • a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
  • a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
  • we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
  • a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it

It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.

The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”

The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.

For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.

Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!

Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”

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.

Heavy-handedness of the message makes it useful vehicle for spreading non-wokist media literacy. When you are watching it together with friends/family (I watched it together with my wife), you can easily point how gratuitous and ridiculous the messaging is. (See how they wrote the Mr Angry Taxpayer as extremely unsympathetic overweight white male? And his complaint that the staff was preferentially taking in non-serious but sympathetic cases was correct.)

Sometimes I wondered - either the writing team was so blinded out by their politics they didn't notice when overtly woke writing was so illogical it got a Straussian reading, or was there someone in scriptwriting team getting non-woke Straussian takes past the radar.

Incel plot-line was the biggest flag here. Evidence he is an incel planning a school shooting is flimsy - we are told he wrote a list of names girls in his class he hates in his diary - and only part of it shown-on screen is his mother's testimony and interpretation. POV character, Dr Robby points out there is not much legitimate basis for them to do much, but tries to talk with the boy who leaves the hospital. Everyone in the ER acts like a classic bigot about the 'incel', and when the big shoot-out happens, they double up the bigotry. Pushy doctor McKay reports him to the police and everyone else spreads unfounded rumor that the kid is the shooter among the patients, who get agitated. Dr Robby shows some skepticism, pointing out that it is not really justified to arrest people for thought crimes. They have the mother to sign the paperwork for boys involuntarily commitment. Audience should take notice how the whole thing resembles a witch hunt. Later, the suspect returns to the ER, where he is promptly arrested. The writing team pulls a switch which is surprising only if the audience had joined in the bigotry - the boy wasn't the shooter. It was telegraphed almost because there almost always is a twist after such a build-up.

The ER held him for psych evaluation anyway, because the paperwork was signed and they are scared he is a troubled incel who might do something. Robby tells McKay she has fucked up, and McKay 'talks with him', delivering a sanctimonious speech that is mostly about her own insecurities. Nevertheless, everything is magically fixed because later we see a shot of the boy agreeing to talk with therapist. Superficially it validates McKay's actions, I thought it fell flat - given the series had established that boy was guilty of nothing but sulking. Taking some distance from the emotional beats, the plotline as written is about gross injustice caused by suspicions and rumors. Everyone with any life experience knows that half-hour chat with psychiatrist usually solves nothing. Only thing missing is written comeuppance for the ER team.

The second one was the Two Dads. They made so large a point how there was two dads, with neurodivergent doctor launching into emotional rhapsodies how the dads were so happy with their baby, with no word for the surrogate mother. Bu if you watch watch what happens the episode, it is kinda weird because the dramatic medical drama of the episode is how the surrogate non-mother does all the work and almost dies of complications of the delivery. Just because the "dads" could be happy. Meanwhile she is othered as non-mother unperson by the staff while they save her life, who treat only the dads as family who matters, and have no acknowledgement for what she did - the baby is immediately disappeared from her view to be bottle-fed by the "dads", no mention of colostrum. Only one of the "dads" gets some lines reminiscing on their friendship and how she is doing some kind of sacrifice while almost dying. Realistically, the situation would be even more troubling because surrogates usually are not life-long friends of the "dads", but doing it for monetary compensation, with no memories to be reminisce about. If you don't come with strong progressive priors, the practice of surrogacy does not come out looking good.

UGH, I will never be able to swallow watching this kind of shit. What kind of an incel would be school shooter keeps a diary? How OLD are teh script writers? Sure an incel might joke with his Twitter/Discord/4chan shitlord buddies about doing it online, but a diary?

What kind of an incel would be school shooter keeps a diary?

One who is also transgender -- Audrey Hale, whose "manifesto" was more like a diary -- though that wouldn't fit the narrative. Also I don't know if Hale was an incel.

Hale was a girl, that definitely changes things. When I hear, "keeps a diary" I imagine either some one older than boomers or a girl. Also, there's a world apart between a manifesto and "dear diary"

You can see it, but I think in general deeper messages just don't get though. Heavy-handed moralizing is used because it works.

This is a generalized woke failure that they just... fail to say anything convincing to anybody not onboard with their program to begin with. They look ridiculous not like 'just decent persons'. Libs of TikTok was successful propaganda by showing wokes explaining their position in their own words.

There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.

There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.

Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.

I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."

To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.

they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out

Wait, what? This is insane revisionism, the bloody scandal was in the other direction!

https://www.dw.com/en/infected-blood-scandal-a-horrifying-global-disaster/a-70093762

Hundreds of thousands of people got HIV and/or hepatitis via infected blood transfusions over the past decades, and people are still dying.

"Any country that bought contaminated blood from the US in the 1980s was affected," said Wherry.

In Canada, 2,000 people contracted HIV and 60,000 people developed hepatitis C. … in France, more than 4,000 people contracted HIV.

In Germany, a scandal erupted in 1993 after government officials tried to cover up reports of HIV/AIDS in people given infected blood. Over 400 people died, and a third of the country's hemophiliacs (2,000 people at the time) were infected with HIV.

China also saw HIV infections from contaminated blood bought and sold internally. An estimated 300,000 people were infected with HIV through blood selling-schemes in the 1990s.

People are still being infected with diseases by contaminated blood products. In 2016, more than 2,000 people in India contracted HIV from contaminated blood transfusions

Yes you can screen blood, but this was only developed in the mid 80s and had high failure rate, for example it detected antigens which are made by the body after months of infection, so a freshly infected could still contaminate the blood supply.

Yeah, but gay rights activists are angry that MSM can’t donate blood, because they feel it stigmatizes being gay.

But I agree with you, people valuing defeating stigma more than protecting people from serious diseases is a really bad thing. I think the gay community has long been in denial about how seriously HIV/AIDS created rather than reflected stigma against gay men, and my understanding is it became something of a rite of passage back in the day — “I’m pozzed, so I no longer need to worry about it.”

The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.

But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.

There was a joke repeated in And the band played on from the early days of AIDS:

What's the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your wife you're Haitian.

Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife

Those cases were ridiculous and even when there was the briefest glimmer of treating the incel like a human being and McKay being way too high on her own supply, nope, immediately back to her sanctimonious attitude being what was clearly intended as right.

Frustrating show, in that way. Did like the bit about the old man who worked with Mr. Rogers.

I haven't seen this show, but all the praise being lavished on it makes me go "Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"

St. Elsewhere is an American medical drama television series created by Joshua Brand and John Falsey that originally ran on NBC from October 26, 1982, to May 25, 1988. The series stars Ed Flanders, Norman Lloyd, and William Daniels as teaching doctors at an aging, run-down Boston hospital who give interns a promising future in making critical medical and life decisions. The series was produced by MTM Enterprises, which had success with a similar NBC series, the police drama Hill Street Blues, during that same time. The series were often compared to each other for their use of ensemble casts and overlapping serialized storylines (an original ad for St. Elsewhere quoted a critic that called the series "Hill Street Blues in a hospital").

Recognized for its gritty, realistic drama, St. Elsewhere gained a small yet loyal following (the series never ranked higher than 47th place in the yearly Nielsen ratings) over its six-season, 137-episode run; however, the series also found a strong audience in Nielsen's 18–49 age demographic, a demo later known as a young, affluent audience that TV advertisers were eager to reach. The series also earned critical acclaim during its run, earning 13 Emmy Awards for its writing, acting, and directing and is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time.

I haven't seen this show, but all the praise being lavished on it makes me go "Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"

People don't watch old shows. They just empirically don't.

St. Elsewhere and its copy, ER (or was it ER that copied St. Elsewhere? I can't remember) were preachy at times and full of Very Special Episodes, but in the 80s and 90s conservatives could sometimes be depicted as sympathetic characters. (If they remade Family Ties, Alex Keaton would have to be a Never Trumper with a trans best friend, and West Wing would have to make all the Republican characters except the outright villains members of the Lincoln Project.)

I have to wonder if this is a part of the success formula for Big Bang Theory- Sheldon's mother may not be everyone's favorite, but she definitely has redeeming qualities and listening to her is usually a solution for the character's problems.

I haven't seen this show, but all the praise being lavished on it makes me go "Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"

I hate to break it to you grandma, but that show's over forty years old now. I'll have to ask my mom if she's heard of it, she was fond of the odd medical drama that somehow found its way to India back then, though the odds are against it.

There's a shown on Apple TV called Berlin ER or something with a similar hospital context. But that's foreign, so.

Berlin ER or Krank Berlin as it should've been called since that's its name is a pretty good show that has the same sort of hectic pace and stays in the vein of only slight bits of story/personal lives away from the hospital.

It's doesn't have the constant woke injections like The Pitt but I'd say it still does the special bit of showing that cops are just as bad or worse than gang members thing by the end.

I was shocked at the show seemingly displaying the immigration demographics as they are (I assume, I'm not German). Much of the cast is brown/black and immigrant and most of the people coming into the hospital are as well. And for the first few episodes it felt like there wasn't going to be much of political angle at all but after much of the emergency room visits being immigrant gang members knifing each other I suppose maybe they had to have their cops beating innocent people because they're the wrong color part to not be accused of being racist. Either way it's pretty good but gets kinda washed out in the middle, treading water and extending plots over episodes when they could have wrapped up more quickly. But I think it finishes well, it's not many episodes anyway.

The medical accuracy felt much weaker but I don't know about German medical standards and the hospital in the show is supposed to be a piece of shit that barely runs so it's less about watching a well-oiled machine work like The Pitt and more about seeing how a hospital that has no real facilities, equipment, or staff to handle pretty much any medical situation muddles through. It does have much less insufferable characters and situations than The Pitt. But it also feels amateurish by comparison when showing the medical cases and treatments which is a shame.

Being that there > 100 episodes, it persisted in syndication for some time after it's initial run completed. I remember it on Nick at Night in the late 90's.

Denzel Washington - 137 episodes

"Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"

No, few of those praising the show remember St. Elsewhere. Because they were born after St. Elsewhere ended.

That is the point I guess, all these kids not even born forty years ago imagine they've invented Liberal Media Talking-Points on TV shows for the first time 😁

The medical accuracy and fast-paced intensity of the show are really good. After watching a good portion of this season, I ended up going back to the old ER from the 1990s and 2000s and watched several seasons. There's a lot of nostalgia and good accuracy with series as well, which I enjoyed, but I noticed the same sort of progressive lecturing in the 1990s ER episodes as I did in the The Pitt. I've come to realize over recent years that social lecturing is heavily baked into a lot of these mainstream shows. It's incredibly powerful and influential.

The side effect of this realization it is that I am quick to dismiss any new series or movies wherein I catch a whiff of this sort of presentist lecturing. Even though I recognize the moral framework and lecturing of older 1980s and 90s shows and movies, it aligns more with how I view the world so I can tolerate a certain amount of it. I find the current progressive ideological force-feeding in entertainment to be insufferable though. I understand that society moves on and changes, and that some of my frustration is just a natural reaction to entertainment no longer appealing to my age group, but I also think this era of film entertainment is objectively terrible when it comes to the hit:miss ratio.

Big budget film companies adhere to certain formulas that will turn a profit, while the only real social risks taken in big films is the left-leaning. The latter isn't new but the type of leftwing ideology being pushed is. To add insult to injury, these large production companies churn out something like 6 superhero/comic book films per year at about $200m per film, along with a biopic or two that are well done, but not really worthy of the praise they typically get. Smaller studios like A24 are promising, but they too are unfortunately captured by the same progressive ideology that has consumed every Western institution on the planet. There are still some diamonds in the rough (Top Gun: Maverick), but it is mind-numbing how widespread and pervasive this sort of progressive lecturing has become.

I recognize the moral framework and lecturing

In the 60's Captain Kirk could kiss green space ladies and his black colleague, even if he was being forced by aliens with telekinetic powers.

Smaller studios like A24 are promising

If you haven't seen it, A24 distributed a film called Warfare that was actually pretty good.

Warfare was excellent, something really unique and special in the movie world. It comes very close to being an exact minute-by-minute recreation of the events it depicts and had some unique stylistic choices (most obviously the total lack of a soundtrack) that I think made it tremendously effective. My fiancée and I caught it at the tail end of its theatrical run and both loved it. I would highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject matter/genre.

I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.

Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.

If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.

Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.

I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.

I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.

I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.

pied piper of Hamelin

What's the moral of the tale, to you? (This is a 20 year mystery for me.)

What's the moral of the tale, to you?

Be sure to pay the piper if you want to call the tune.

When you make deals with the Devil, do not try to welch on the deal, it never ends well.

Clearly the Piper is not an ordinary human being, and when you think about it, neither is the plague of rats. If you have a mysterious plague then hot on its heels a mysterious figure turns up offering to fix it for you, pay the goddamn gold and be glad that's all you had to hand over. The city officials were both greedy and stupid, and the entire town had to pay the price as a result.

Maybe also "government officials have always been on the take" as well.

Pay your pest control contractors or they'll murder your children.

pied piper of Hamelin

To be honest, I don't recall the details of the actual tale. I was just using the phrase in its usual metaphorical sense - I just double checked Wikipedia, about this, and it suggested that "The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.".

Skimming the Wikipedia page for this makes the tale, and its history, sound pretty interesting in its own right, but I don't have much to add to that.

I suppose, as normally used, it's "short term gains mean long term losses". Being enticed away by something that sounds good, to the point you ignore all other intervention, then you end up losing everything.

I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit.

Yea, covid and Trust the Science came from people both critical of capitalism and institutional racism but trusting of the combination's experts. One comes to the conclusion that socialism or capitalism, white supremacy and its overcoming, Pfizer would do things the same way. A scientist is a scientist, in Oklahoma or Cuba.

I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.

I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".

I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.

I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").

The controversy on Reddit was that the writers on that particular episode must be Nazis because the villian of the story was particularly in Starfleet and had dialogue that suggested he believed that Nazis were on to something. So obviously the only reason that you could possibly make a character say something positive about Nazis is that they were obviously Nazis. Which, to me seems like a bizarre way to approach literature where the artist is incapable of imagining a belief he doesn’t actually hold. It’s like saying imagination doesn’t exist. But given that understanding of literature I can easily see why the message tends to be smack people on the head obvious simply because they cannot be anything else.

Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.

This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.

I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:

KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?

GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.

KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.

GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.

SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.

KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?

SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.

And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:

SPOCK: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a man as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill's, have made such a fatal error?

KIRK: He drew the wrong conclusion from history. The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men. They were, but the main problem, I think, was the leader principle.

MCCOY: What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.

SPOCK: Thank you, Doctor. I was able to gather the meaning.

MCCOY: It also proves another Earth saying. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?

SPOCK: Yes. Earthmen like Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan. Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.

MCCOY: Spock, you obviously don't understand.

SPOCK: Obviously, Doctor, you fail to accept.

KIRK: Gentlemen. Gentlemen, we've just been through one civil war. Let's not start another.

Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.

Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.

Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.

I’m not sure and I’m not sure how much of an honest answer to the question simply because no academic is free to say anything nice about the nation and era that’s seen as demonic. It would be like asking a 16th century academic in Catholic ruled parts of Europe to describe John Calvin’s Geneva. Saying anything good about it, no matter how true or even obvious is, is going to get you n so much trouble that no one would dare.

The classic example of people saying nice things about Nazi Germany is the autobahn, right? I think historians still feel free to compliment that.

I suppose I think the consensus around Nazi Germany has moved in the direction that they did make some right calls and pick some low-hanging fruit, but also that a lot of their strengths were either inherited (e.g. the military system) or illusory and exaggerated (e.g. taking credit for the German economic revival). Nazism as a system wasn't uniquely brilliant.

The way TOS frames it is as something like a deal with the devil. You get efficiency, power, a rapid rise to power, social solidarity, etc., and all you have to do is be evil. That's not what was going on with Hitler's Germany.

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Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.

It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.

I used to wonder why books sometimes had a little disclaimer on the copyright page about "the views expressed are not necessarily those of the author" because duh, of course someone can write about a thing without thinking it is a good thing (e.g. crime writers writing about serial killers).

And then this sort of literalism and inability to separate out viewpoints expressed by characters from what the author thinks came along. If it is not 21st century liberal to progressive all the way through, then clearly you are saying bad things, and clearly you only say bad things because you believe bad things, and clearly that means you are a bad person.

Though I can't blame "kids these days" for that, even if it is the most egregious examples; it happened back in the day as well. Arthur Conan Doyle had to make it clear to a review that yes, thank you very much, he was aware that he was working in the same field as Poe and Gaboriau of detective fiction, and that just because in early Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes had a poor opinion of Dupin, it did not mean that Doyle himself had a poor view:

To An Undiscerning Critic by Arthur Conan Doyle, in London Opinion (28 December 1912)

Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.

There's also the opposite situation where the author launders his beliefs through his characters. If the characters never have any flaws in their beliefs shown by the story progress (or if the only flaw is "he's too extreme, but it isn't otherwise a bad idea"), there's a good chance the author does believe them. If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident. If the character makes a 3 hour speech and the story quotes 2 hours of it, the character's probably an author mouthpiece.

Don't overcorrect on this.

If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident.

But I was assured that "the knife-ears took er jerbs!" scene was not at all meant to be a comment on Trump and immigration! 😁

I have always enjoyed the critique of Red Dead Redemption 2 along the lines of 'bunch of outlaws and brigands happen to hold perfectly progressive 21st century views on gender, race, consent etcetera'

My favorite was the show Vikings when one of the lead female characters stops a fellow viking raider (and the fact thst there was a woman on the raid already tells you a lot) from raping a woman in the town they're murdering and pillaging in.

IIRC that scene was in the (admittedly heavily embellished)source material- the Vikings(or their Christianized great-grandchildren, whatever) themselves were the ones who lied about it.

I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts

I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.

Oh, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Some describe it as a common trademark of fascism... but I think you might actually see it more frequently from the critics of fascism. It's been the narrative on the alt-right since that term went mainstream: they're both incredibly dangerous and total losers. Hell, it's the narrative on the literal Nazis, as can be observed just a little upthread. They were not merely evil but utterly incompetent in all respects. Safe to say, I think, those same people don't believe the allies overcommitted to fighting the Nazis and really didn't have to try that hard.

But... it's not actually a contradiction? One of the more common arguments you see along this line is anti-anti-immigration: 'Nativists believe both that immigrants are lazy welfare parasites and that they steal jobs from hardworking Americans!' But groups have multiple members: there could be some of each. And often the 'strength' and 'weakness' can co-exist. Are guerilla fighters strong or weak? They can't beat their occupiers face-to-face or they wouldn't be guerillas. But guerilla campaigns have driven occupiers out many times. How about terrorists or incarcerated criminals? How about a world-champion MMA fighter... sent to the front lines in Ukraine? How about Harvey Weinstein? How about an IRS auditor? In some contexts these people are very dangerous and in others they're very weak.

I think you see it everywhere because it's often true; it's the complaint that misses the mark by equivocating over definitional boundaries until it looks like there's a contradiction that doesn't really exist.

It's also an old pre-battle rallying speech technique. "Yes, they're strong, and it's okay to be afraid, but if you do your part and hang in there, we'll beat them because we're stronger".

I think this is just healthy psychological sentiment for any human trying to competitively get things done vs. another human. Mike Tyson has a good quote about this:

While I’m in the dressing room five minutes before I come out, I’m breaking my gloves down, I’m pushing the leather to the back of my gloves, so my knuckle could pierce through. When I come out I have supreme confidence. I’m scared to death. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of losing. I’m afraid of being humiliated. But I’m confident. The closer I get to the ring the more confident I get. The closer, the more confident. The closer the more confident I get. All during training I’ve been afraid of this man. I think this man might be capable of beating me. I’ve dreamed of him beating me. For that I’ve always stayed afraid of him. The closer I get to the ring the more confident I get. Once I’m in the ring I’m a god. No one could beat me. I walk around the ring but I never take my eyes off my opponent. Even if he’s ready and pumping, and can’t wait to get his hands on me. I keep my eyes on him. I keep my eyes on him. Then once I see a chink in his armor, boom, one of his eyes may move, and then I know I have him. Then once he comes to the center of the ring he looks at me with his piercing look as if he’s not afraid. But he already made that mistake when he looked down for that one tenth of a second. I know I have him. He’ll fight hard for the first two or three rounds, but I know I broke his spirit. During the fight I’m supremely confident. I’m making him miss and I’m countering. I’m hitting him to the body; I’m punching him real hard. And I’m punching him, and I’m punching him, and I know he’s gonna take my punches. He goes down, he’s out. I’m victorious. Mike Tyson, greatest fighter that ever lived.

What is that but “my enemy is simultaneously too strong and too weak?” And lots of competitive athletes have very similar points of view about their psychology during training and competition. It energizes them and keeps them hungry and competitive.

So I think you’re right, it’s a common narrative and, one step further, it’s a good and healthy narrative.

Side note:

Mike Tyson is the greatest SPORTS champion who ever lived ... probably. But we will never know for sure.

After Cus D'Amato died and the Don King organization brain fucked a literal homeless kid from New York, it derailed Tyson's career with no possibility for a comeback in boxing (although his podcast / movie / pot farm career seems to have been, and remained, quite lucrative).

He was a physical freak who also had an insane natural, prodigal understanding of boxing itself. If you watch the 80s videos when he's still pretty much a teenager, his movement is not only fast but anticipatory in ways that usually only come with experience. He sets up sequences before launching them - which is made all the more unstoppable by the fact that his punching power is generally beyond measure.

I've been contemplating the idea of writing a long effortpost on "Did Money Actually Ruin Sports?" and Tyson and boxing would be at the center of it rather than the usual suspects of the Big Four (Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey). The primary reason for that is that, with a longer lived Cus D'Amato and the blocking out of Don King et al., I think Tyson would be the absolute consensus pick for "Greatest American Athlete" of all time.

You’re right, it’s a common narrative because it is adaptive—but as a cursory look at the natural world will tell you, “adaptive” does not necessarily mean good, true, or righteous.

Righteous is irrelevant, though?

True is also irrelevant because your enemy is always a mystery. Lacking 100% knowledge of your enemy (because how could you ever have it?), it is impossible to know the truth of your enemy. So it’s best to plan with humility and act with confidence.

And I say good in the context of healthy, as in, likely to lead to a better and more predictively successful life

So, adaptive wins, as it always does.

Edit: Probably worth saying that I think this is also a good and righteous state of mind. When God told the Israelites he was giving them Canaan, they didn’t just waltz in and wait for God to vaporize their enemies. They sent in spies, scoped out the land, enjoyed a few odds-evening miracles, engaged in effective battle strategies, suffered and died to defeat (partially) enemies that were simultaneously too strong (to be defeated solely by the Israelites) and too weak (to resist God’s will).

> it’s a common narrative and, one step further, it’s a good and healthy narrative.

As for truth, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fascinating concept, but people can and do come to definitive conclusions about the world all the time. Are the #resist libs correct in assuming themselves the underdogs?

people can and do come to definitive conclusions about the world all the time

But this is different from truth. A definitive conclusion is just a definitive conclusion. People conclude wrongly all the time. The truth will be discovered in the contest.

Are the #resist libs correct in assuming themselves the underdogs?

We’ll find out, won’t we? But at every moment, it is best for me, Joe Chud Reactionary, to treat them as both strong (they control many commanding heights of information warfare and have copious quantities of the sinews of war, among other advantages), and weak (I must believe that they can in fact be defeated, implying that my side is stronger than them due to some combination of factors.)

They would benefit from doing the same thing, so I hope they don’t.

I got sniped by your edit, RIP. To respond, you seem to think of the “weak but strong” mindset as recognizing the enemy’s strength but thinking oneself still capable of taking them on. This is, indeed, a healthy mindset to have towards one’s adversaries. As I tend to see it in practice though, it’s a cognitive trap that does improve morale, but usually does so at the cost of epistemic clarity(e.g. “Republikkkans are literal fascists, we can surely defeat them with protests and slogans!)

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"Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism

The damage done by that Umberto Eco essay is up there with the xkcd "showing you the door" comic.

But not quite up there with that misunderstood Karl Popper quote!

I am a doctor and an extremely anti-woke consumer of media (although if it's good...it's good).

The Pitt didn't bother me.

The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).

However in this case this stuff is adding verisimilitude because that's how the field is. Especially at a teaching hospital and especially the trainees are crazy far left (because it's part of the admission package and curriculum) or are just good at pretending so they don't get ostracized.

A small sample is the TV in the surgical lounge - we abuse trainees all the time (unfortunately), if you fuck up suturing? You will go home crying. Put a subjective finding in the objective section of your two minute patient presentation at 4am? Crying.

In this sort of environment the trainees still feel comfortable changing the TV from Fox (its always that) to MSNBC and then breaking it/hiding the remote/locking it/whatever.

The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).

I give fantasy stuff huge leeway, because it's fantasy you can do whatever, though a specific trope's repetition (black people lopsidedly in everything) is bad. The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.

The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.

I find this perspective a bit baffling. Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one. It's how you get people making convoluted theories about code-names and plastic surgery to explain how James Bond turns into a different guy in-between movies. It's just a recast, bro. The 'real' James Bond looks neither exactly like Sean Connery nor exactly like George Lazenby. They're actors. Stand-ins. Race-blind casting in historical dramas works in the same way. A black actor is playing a character who, "in-universe", the audience is expected to understand wasn't actually black.

If you find this sort of thing immersion-breaking, fair enough. I certainly understand the appeal of television which leans really hard into hyper-researched realism; Rings of Power must particularly rankle because the Jackson films were built on this sort of thing. But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.

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I think it's a combination of a few things

  • These modifications largely only go one way in modern culture. There'll be Black Blitz sufferers, but there will be no White characters in an equivalent tale about Africa 500 years ago
  • A lot of people are staggeringly ignorant and take this sort of thing at face value, promoting this sort of 'eternal present day' mindset in which it becomes impossible to think rationally about historical topics since you're essentially imagining the current level of affluence and racial integration to have extended back forever. I've met people who genuinely think Bridgerton is a historical tale.

But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.

So there is no distinction between fantasy and a straightforward historical drama for which factual depictions are expected? You don't think an East Asian Cleopatra would be massively distracting and rightly so? Or that a morbidly obese Marilyn Monroe would be a non-starter?

James Bond and LOTR. Both are fantasy.

So there is no distinction between fantasy and a straightforward historical drama for which factual depictions are expected?

Perhaps there historically has been (although people sure didn't use to shy away from casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan). I am simply saying that the pro-race-blind-casting position is to reject the expectation of realistic depiction; not to surrender historical accuracy itself. The smart pro-race-blind-casting argument isn't "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra is canonically Chinese" but "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra, a Greek woman in-universe, is played by a Chinese woman". i.e. you should look past the fact the actress in Chinese in the same way you look past the fact that she's speaking modern English instead of subtitled Ancient Greek.

I sympathize with saying that this is a distracting burden to place on the audience. But people keep complaining "but Cleopatra wasn't Chinese. casting a Chinese Cleopatra would be inaccurate", and that is the position I am trying to defeat. "Cleopatra is canonically speaking Ancient Greek, but the audience doesn't understand it and the actress can't pronounce it properly anyway, so we'll depict the dialogue in (non-diegetic) modern English" -> "Cleopatra is canonically Greek, but Chinese actors need jobs and Hollywood doesn't make that many meaty historical dramas about Chinese history, so we'll cast a (non-diegetically) Chinese actress as Cleopatra".

I look forward to seeing an Asian Cassius Clay and a white Idi Amin.

The conventions of movies and TV are that your actor should look like your character as best as you can; unlike in live theatre, race-blind casting isn't typically a thing. Of course there's a lot of latitude -- Naveen Andrews isn't Iraqi but they can get away with casting him as a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard because the audience doesn't know an Indian from an Iraqi anyway. It doesn't extend to filling WWII-era London with black people or making a remake of Roots with half of the African characters looking like Norwegians.

You can argue that the convention ought to be broken, but then you have to deal with what I noted in my first sentence and the Roots remake -- you also have to justify making it work one way only.

you also have to justify making it work one way only

Well, that's where the usual affirmative-action argument comes in - "black actors deserve as many job opportunities and chances to shine as white actors, and they won't get them unless you go for race-blind casting and compromise on the convention of casting for physical resemblance". Notably, this argument works even without ascribing racist animus to any casting director - it's just an emergent consequence of e.g. most historical dramas being based on western history.

And you can certainly reject that argument if you want, for all sorts of reasons. I don't buy it all the way myself (I personally don't find race-blind casting distracting, and would encourage more productions to use it if it were up to me; but equally, if a director is really committed to a lifelike historical vision, I think that's their prerogative and it doesn't make them a racist, which is a hot take these days). The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position, which means the endless arguments about the plausibility of black WWII pilots or black Hobbits are a distraction. If they want to be taken seriously - and granted, that is an uphill battle to an unfair degree - retractors need to ask more questions like "Is it detrimental to a film's artistic worth for a white WWII pilot to be portrayed by a black actor?", 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.

retractors need to ask more questions like "Is it detrimental to a film's artistic worth for a white WWII pilot to be portrayed by a black actor?"

I think the point is precisely this. Yes, it is.

If the film is creating a dramatic version of a historical event, I believe it's fundamentally important to try and nail a depiction of the time and place -- including important demographic features like race. Hoffmeister's point is that putting black actors in the shoes of white historical figures robs the white people who actually did those things of credit, and gives it to people from another background, which distorts people's understanding of what history was like, in a way that would never be tolerated if it happened in the other direction -- for good reasons.

I don't think people should be getting their opinions of the racial dynamics of the past from Hollywood, but nevertheless they do, and it's important that people not distort history unless they have an explicit artistic reason to do so, and "we would like to hire more black actors" is not an artistic reason, it's an HR reason, and a political reason.

I'm as angry at dramatizations that mislead in terms of plot and storytelling as I am about racial features, I just think the race-swapping is a uniquely silly element that's not about Hollywood being sensational -- which is something you can make an artistic argument for, however weak -- but about it being political. I agree with you that people should be able to make race-swapped movies about historical figures if they want, particularly if they have an artistic vision for it, but that's not what's happening and it's not applied fairly.

That's my view on the RAF situation -- and the critical point about this is that your comparison to Kermit is totally inapt, because Kermit the Frog isn't real, and the RAF pilots who save Britain from German bombers, and the British victims of the Blitz, were very, very real. We're talking about historical events that caused suffering and generated heroism among real people, in the real world. Titanic, for instance, is an interesting one -- and it's telling that this major film depicted the Titanic's passengers as very white and aimed for a realistic depiction of the dress and style of the period, even as it showed a love story that never happened.

Again, people shouldn't get their history from Hollywood dramas. But they do.

You wrote this:

Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one.

It's certainly a modern idea, but so is the motion picture! "What we see on-screen" as a concept is very new, and so of course the ideas that exist surrounding it are new!

What people are responding to is the artistic concepts that have developed in response to a novel media; the motion picture has tropes, values, and consistent patterns as an artform, and violating those patterns involves a certain amount of intention. If people violate them to explore artistically, that's cool. They're not doing that, and it's detrimental to the artistic value of a film that they aren't.

What are those patterns?

Hollywood goes out of its way to depict the world -- real or imagined -- as convincingly as possible. They invest in massive CGI scenes to give people the impression that spaceships can travel faster than light. They burn render farms at full utilization to convince viewers that a beat-up old camero you see on the street could actually be a giant humanoid robot from the planet Cybertron. They have invented all manner of prosthetics to make Klingons from the planet Qo'noS seem plausible, and to convince people that Alex Murphy died and became a cyborg.

Your point that "what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe" is simply how Hollywood operates. That's what directors love about film! It's what actors are challenged by! It's why special effects are such a fascinating industry! And it's the unique blessing of the camera and the editor: the ability to carefully curate the experience to put the audience in the world as convincingly as possible. It's why people are enchanted by movies!

Pixar used to make fake bloopers for their movies -- yes, their animated movies -- because they knew that this enhanced the audience's feelings that what was happening on-screen was real, that the characters were, in a sense, "actors" in a live-action movie. That's how devoted Hollywood is to convincing people of the absolute reality of what's on screen!

What you're talking about, with "black actors can play white Hobbits", well, I simply do not agree in any way that this is the actual belief system of race-swapping casting. The point is that the Hobbits are themselves black, and always were. What you're arguing is not a steelman of the real views, it's just your own views that you're attributing to them. Which is fine! I like your views a lot better than theirs! But it's just not their views, and you're doing your own understanding, and your argument's strength, a real disservice to say that they are.

Actually, what you're talking about sounds like a play, which is a medium that grew up in a time of thespian scarcity and often acting troupes that had to make the best with the members they had. Obviously female roles were often played by men in certain time periods!

Plays require audiences to submit to what you call "the artifice of fiction" more intensely. That's the unique artistic opportunity of the play. But note that race-shifting historical figures in plays today is often an explicit artistic choice, not a "we chose the best actor for the role": Hamilton is exhibit A of this. Crucially, in Hamilton, there was an artistic purpose (however good or bad) for the race-swapping, and no one was under the impression that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton weren't white. With many historical films, that just isn't the case, and understanding of the historical figures' backgrounds are less ubiquitous.

But the artifice of fiction, as you describe it, was a time- and medium- based limitation of the theatre that audiences understood. In the world of Hollywood as it exists, to avoid making "what we see on-screen" different from "the literal truth of the fictional universe" is to violate the expectations, schemas, and assumptions the audience brings to the medium. That can be a fertile ground for artistic exploration! But you're not arguing that race-swapping is occurring for artistic reasons. You're arguing it's occurring for political and economic reasons -- and that the actual artistic vision is irrelevant to who people see on screen! That's not Hollywood's way.

But, I'll make you a deal: when Hollywood makes a Transformers movie where some guy just goes off-screen and goes, "bur-cha-church-cha-cha-ba-ba-ding-ding-church" and the frame cuts from a semi-truck to a guy in a haloween costume of Optimus Prime, we can talk about race-blind casting of historical figures and characters from tightly-constructed fictional universes.

The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position

No, it isn't. It varies between "the convention ought to be broken but only in casting in the correct direction in the progressive stack" and "we aren't breaking the convention, there really were all these black people in Britain who were covered up by racist historians" (to be fair the latter was Dr. Who).

"the convention ought to be broken but only in casting in the correct direction in the progressive stack"

Yes, but I parse this as "the convention ought to be broken. separately, we should introduce a whole new convention about never making casting decisions that reduce the pool of roles available to POC actors". The reason a white actor playing a historically black character would be lambasted is not that it would break the norm of physically-realistic casting; the outrage you would get in such a situation would very much be rooted in "how dare you take this part away from deserving black actors".

Yes, but I parse this as "the convention ought to be broken. separately, we should introduce a whole new convention about never making casting decisions that reduce the pool of roles available to POC actors".

This is a bad parse. The convention is not being broken for reasons separate from "woke" concerns. And it's not all about the well-being of the POC actors either; part of the point is to portray more POC characters.

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?

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.

This is expressly incorrect.

If you open up your copy of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes in the appendices that the Rohirrim do not resemble the Anglo-Saxons:

This linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain.

He represents the language of Rohan as old English in order to express its linguistic relationship to the common speech spoken by the hobbits, which he represents as modern English, but he says clearly that the folk of Rohan do not especially resemble the ancient English otherwise.

Likewise for Gondor, note Tolkien's Letter #294, where he is responding to and criticising the draft of an interview of him for the Daily Telegraph:

[Journalist:] Middle-earth .... corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe.

Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically Northern is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to 'Middle-earth'. This is an old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.

Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic'.

Tolkien analogises the return of the king to Gondor to the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, with its capital in Rome. It seems to me that this would make Gondor or Minas Tirith the proper analogue to Rome itself, or Italy more generally. This seems supported by his intention that Gondor is, in terms of latitude, somewhere roughly between northern Italy and Greece or western Turkey.

I agree that The Rings of Power is garbage and that, in general, actors should be cast who plausibly resemble the characters they are intended to portray, but I want to nitpick that your claim about Tolkien's intentions here is just false.

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!

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You have chosen an especially poor example with Rings off 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 (…) 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.

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. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.

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.

Well, yeah. Notably, however, this is a very different argument from it being wrong because Saiorse Ronan is physically too different from the historical Tubman and casting her would be unrealistic. The outrage would be rooted in the racial politics of denying a job from some other, black actress who rightfully "deserved" it more than a white actress ever could. If, say, a black actress with dwarfism were to be cast as Harriet Tubman, this would scarcely be more physically accurate than casting Saiorse Ronan, and yet I predict you'd see much fewer complaints.

(Also, in an ideal world, I, for one, believe a director who sincerely wanted to make that movie for the reasons you ascribe to him ought to be able to make it and not be branded a racist for having made it. That's neither here nor there because I'm trying to steelman the pro-race-blind-casting position as it actually exists, not mount my own argument, but I thought it would be worth clarifying so we know where we stand.)

I think you recognize that there is an explicitly redistributive aspect to modern race-swapped casting.

Indeed I do, and I've recognized it explicitly in this thread.

Even in cases where it doesn't really matter what race the characters are, like The Little Mermaid or Ghostbusters, it's usually a red flag for a lazy retelling where the film makers are going to respond to criticisms about how lazy it is by whining about racism.

Something like Bridgerton is in the middle, where they acknowledge what's going on, that it's historical revisionism, and people think that's fun. I haven't watched it to see if it's any good or not.

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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. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.

Are you saying that when we see black actors on the screen or the stage, we should imagine they are actually white (if the characters are supposedly white)?

I am not sure if you're trolling or serious.

Like, first of all, are you proposing that this is actually the intent of casting black women as Viking leaders and black people as elves and hobbits? Like, the director was thinking "This black actress is actually playing a white Swedish man, but she really nailed the role and the audience will get that she's actually supposed to be a white man? And the audience watching black elves and hobbits will just imagine them being white?"

I think that is extraordinarily unlikely. I don't think anyone from the director to the actors were actually thinking that, and they certainly didn't intend the audience to think that, and imagine if anyone did say "Actually, their characters are really white." That would... not be accepted. It would be black erasure. It would be white fragility for being unable to imagine characters as anything but white. It would #hollywoodsowhite and white supremacy. Come on.

There is a thin argument to be made for affirmative action in casting, and likewise a thin argument based on historical inequity to say "It's okay to cast a black actor as a historically white character but not okay to cast a white character as a historically black character." I don't really agree with this (I think some roles don't matter much - a black James Bond, sure. A black King Arthur? Please. Hamilton was a special case where casting everyone as black was intentional to make a point) but I get why the one provokes outrage and the other we're just supposed to accept.

But when you go all-in on detaching race and physical appearance from any kind of historical or fictional verisimilitude, but only ever in one direction, that doesn't seem like affirmative action, that seems like a fuck you that they are basically daring you to object to. I am not fond of the frequent alt-right claims of "humiliation rituals," but goddamn if this doesn't feel like it.

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.

Best example I can think of is Game of Throne's "we aren't sure if they are bastards or not" .......are they half Black? If so.... Recasting debacle.

I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.

Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.

Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.

The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.

It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.

And the extra frustrating thing is the series has dealing with increasing diversity built right in! If they could have just been patient the could have had a few really heavy handed episodes on it, and they would have made sense.

"Rings of Power" got into trouble for exactly this. I'd give Queen-Regent Míriel a pass (we don't know in canon anything about her mother's family or who her mother was, and there were good Haradrim/Easterlings who interacted with the Edain, so it's not impossible that her maternal family were persons of colour) but the Hobbits, sorry, Harfoots and Stoors, were just too much. A lot of jokes about "and is the final season going to end with they get to the Shire and then there's a mass genocide where only the white Hobbits survive?" since this is meant to be prequel to the LoTR movies and that is established canon that the Hobbits are all white.

I'm waiting for season three to see how they write themselves out of all the corners they've written themselves into, but I wonder will we ever get that season three in the end?

They didn't even need to do that!! The Sea People are canonically black, and so is the Seanchan princess!

Reminds me of a scene in Rings of Power where two tavern drunks abuse this guy for being an elf, calling him 'knife-ears'. As if that is the thing you would notice in faux-medieval England.

Plus he's the one single black Elf in the company. Which is okay, I guess, since all the other white Elves get murderised by the Orcs later so at least it didn't happen to anyone important. It's even dumber because the "Southlands" are what later becomes "Mordor", and the Elven garrison is there specifically because the ancestors of the Southlanders fought on the side of Morgoth.

So it's bordered by "to the northeast and east, Rhûn; to the southeast, Khand; and to the south, Harad" which means that the population there has every reason to be racially mixed. But no, we get the majority of the actors with speaking parts being white and racist to The One Single Black Elf, while the good person is the healer Bronwyn played by an Iranian-British actress. I guess the "racism bad, mmkay?" point wouldn't have landed the same had it been brown or black characters abusing a white Elf.

Maybe it's just me, but Cruz Cordova is such a bad actor. I couldn't believe the reviews praising him, he's as wooden as his breastplate in the role.

Does the medical field understand that alienating conservatives through crazy far left is the reason for their decline in public trust?

I'm not intending that as a snarl. I'm intending that as a legitimate question- have they considered it?

Absolutely not, they think it's because conservatives are "___" (insert attack here).

Same level of blindness as media people who can't see why movies are failing etc.

The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).

True, all The Pitt’s lecturing about Current Thing is still less immediately risible than getting fifteen minutes into The Northman (a serious movie about Vikings) and seeing an actress that is obviously a Martian.

Look, even human-alien hybrids are entitled to become actors if that is their calling.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any roles for Extraterrestrial-American actresses. I’m just saying these roles should be where historically and dramatically appropriate. Playing a genetically engineered creature in Morgan? Yes that’s a perfectly reasonable role for an ayy. Queen’s Gambit? It’s a bit of a reach, there were no ayylmao chess grandmasters back then. But given how much covert extraterrestrial involvement there was in the Cold War it doesn’t seem too ridiculous. But we don’t need to go cramming an ayy into a movie set in Scandinavia in the 11th century. It’s intentional human-erasure. And they clearly take special glee in casting her in romantic relationships with Earthmen. It’s about as subtle as a pornography video from PROBED .com.

I don't know, are you saying there were no hybrids existing in the 10th century? Because how then do you account for the tales of humans meeting beings from the other world that are common throughout all folklore globally? See the legends of Merlin being a son of "one of the Airish Men" or a demon! So it's feasible that there could have been a hybrid among the Vikings even back then. This anti-Martian prejudice reflects poorly on you, an otherwise stalwart Mottizen!

Ah there it is. The appeal to Politically Correct “history” that is the final refuge of every anti-human subversive. “The witches abduction of Gunnlaugr in the Eyrbyggja Saga is clearly a premodern attempt to describe an alien abduction!” bleats the graduate student with a research grant sponsored by The Groom Lake Institute for Advanced Aeronautics and Cultural Understanding.

All I'm saying is that the multiple traditions of "don't go to this area at this time of year, else you will disappear and not return until decades have passed, you have not aged but everyone you knew is old or dead" point to classic time-dilation effects of FTL travel. Can you deny this evidence and do you still maintain that human-alien contact did not occur until the mid 20th century?

obviously a Martian

This is goblin erasure.

I think you may be confusing the Northman with Anora.

Well played.

You’re actually underselling the wokeness of the Pitt. Some mildly SPOILERY events:

  • A black woman comes into the hospital with extreme pain. A white doctor thinks she is faking the pain to get painkillers, but a non-white doctor comes in and declares that she has sickle cell anemia and really is in pain.

  • Later on, a white main comes into the hospital with extreme pain. The white doctors believe him, but a non-white doctor correctly infers that he’s a drug addict.

  • A white family has a kid with measles because they didn’t get him vaccinated. They then delay treatment almost to the point of the kid dying because the mother “does her own research” with blogs.

  • A white man in the waiting room is repeatedly rude and causes escalating problems because he has to keep waiting to be seen by the doctors while more injured people get treatment before him. At one point, the white man complains about other people getting treatment with his tax dollars. Later, the white man punches a female administrator in the face and says something MAGA-y.

  • A white woman in the waiting room initiates a fight with someone because the latter person is wearing a hospital mask. IIRC, the white woman even screams something about Fauci lying.

  • An obese woman comes in with a vague problem. A doctor tells her to lose weight and the obese woman gets upset. Another doctor comes in, finds the real problem (which isn’t related to obesity) and scolds the first doctor for being fixated on the obesity. 

  • A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.

This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.

Left out the one inadvertent right wing culture war. Female doc reveals that she had aborted a male doc's kid without him knowing (he of course totally understands) is now struggling with infertility, has a miscarriage on shift.

Not even wokeness can stay the powerful dramatic impulse to write a story of karmic retribution.

It's not just the presence of these events, it's the absence of others.

I remember being shocked as a kid when a bad guy in CSI: Miami turned out to be black. In almost every other case it was some sort of white person. And oh boy was it righteous and great when a white man tried to frame an innocent black man and got caught because of it. Gave an immense justice infused confirmation bias high to my progressive young self.

Re-watched Robocop (1987) recently. I hadn't remembered that, though it's set in Detroit "twenty minutes into the future", pretty much all the criminals are white.

Criminal Minds goes even further in that regard as it features multiple black bad guys (and girls). In one episode it even features a white woman who makes a false rape allegation.

While there are obvious political-correctness-related reasons for this, you do have to consider the 'Dog Bites Man' angle. I wouldn't want detective shows to reflect real crime statistics, because most of the homicides making up those statistics are boring and obvious. 'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.' Right. Not exactly gripping drama. When it's an intelligent, wealthy man hiding a dark secret using an intricate fake alibi - then you have good drama, precisely because it's unusual relative to the real world.

Most of the homicides are boring and obvious but some of them are really funny because of how dumb the criminals are. 'The gun just happened to go off'. They did their drug deal under CCTV. Or the dumb, crass nicknames they have on 'encrypted' messaging for drug importation. Or how they brag about killing this guy in their chat group. Or how they realize only when prompted by a judge that while they're trying to cheat on tax they're only making it worse for themselves, so they completely reverse their story.

Dumb people lying badly is funny and makes the audience feel superior. I'm not a good storyteller and don't remember too much of what I've heard but there's great potential.

Oh, there's potential, but it's not going to scratch that whodunnit itch. It's something else.

'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.'

That's... pretty much Season 1 of The Wire to a T, which is widely acknowledged as one of the best seasons of television ever produced.

Yes, but it's a social realist drama where a big part of what makes it engaging is getting to know the low-rent ghetto drug dealers really well and understanding their quirks and motivations. Per @WandererintheWilderness's point, I don't think an episodic murder mystery series set in the same milieu would be engaging: in a murder mystery, the killer has to be someone unsuspected, and solving the mystery has to be at least something of an intellectual challenge. "Low-rent ghetto drug dealer murders rival drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head" is prime fodder for a crime drama, but probably not for a self-contained episodic murder mystery: there is no mystery, about the identity of the perpetrator, their motive or their method.

The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.

The wire is a character drama focused mostly on the criminals as long-run characters in a broader narrative, though. Very different genre than episodic investigative dramas from the cop's perspective.

You can make an interesting show about investigating lowlives shooting each other. It just wouldn't look anything like CSI.

Okay, but the Wire has more investigative elements than most shows procedural or not. Procedural pretty much really only means self-contained because most investigative shows are filled with gobs of pointless drama and soap-opera b plots that are strung through many episodes or like any British investigative show about 40 minutes of the victim's family arguing about vague things to present them as red herrings. Law & Order is probably the only thing that represents a show that's just investigations contained in an episode, maybe the early CSI seasons as well.

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.

Well, yes. But ultimately the problem is people forming their worldviews based on fiction instead of balancing their intellectual diet with non-fiction or, better yet, first-hand experience of the real world. It's a problem as old as Don Quixote, and I don't think the correct lesson to take from Don Quixote is 'how dare those irresponsible poets fill their ballads with giants, virtuous knights, and loyal servants? we need more books about windmills and scumbags to fix impressionable readers' sense of reality'.

(Granted, biases might still cause writers to limit themselves to a particular kind of man biting a particular kind of dog. But that's a whole other conversation than one about realism.)

I knew it was this sort of show after just one episode and refused my wife’s request to watch further. I have a very well honed woke entertainment detector and nope out the instant I see this sort of thing

A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.

It was definitely a Special Episode kind of moment and speech, but at least that one was about working in Pittsburgh history like the old guy on life support having worked with Mr. Rogers and his family reminiscing before they unplug him.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.

Everything Santos and Mohan says or does? Slight exaggeration, but not much. Certainly not accidental that they keep getting rewarded for hubris, while nervous Whittaker is a punchline with the scrub changes and his living situation.

It was definitely a Special Episode kind of moment and speech

After years and years of not watching tv/streaming shows/movies/what-have-you, they all feel like A Very Special Episode when I'm forced to watch something. It all feels like a lecture where the lecturer views me as an especially dim child.

God, while I'm not happy about being paid about half what my US peers make, I suppose I should count my blessings in that none of this nonsense comes up in my actual job. And that's despite the UK being, in some ways, more Woke than even 2023-America.

(You can't pay me enough to work in the ER)

I can only hope that nobody takes away the message that this is a representative sampling of what actual ER doctors go through, or how they act, even if some of the specific incidents strike me as things that could have happened. Not an expert on the day to day realities of medical work in the States, so hopefully @Throwaway05 has something to add.

Though, to be fair:

We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky.

Are all things that do actually happen. The writers of the show have done at least some homework.

I totally believe the gallows humor aspect. What struck me was which topics didn’t get joked about. Being “unhoused” is Very Serious but not being a crack addict whose name sounds like crack.

Replied elsewhere but in sum, the politics is spot on.

The actual events is umm more condensed (a single day isn't usually that interesting, but a whole month?). Obviously later season events are a bit different.

The competence level is higher than average, especially for the students but it is not out of the realm of possibility for a good group at a high end institution. Independence is a bit much though.

Some inaccuracies but kinda not a lot (and importantly on Meddit you'd see some arguing on "inaccuracies").

The most important part is the vibe and the personalities which....phew. Oh my god it is spot on.

At times really rewarding and people feel seen, at other times...tough.

We'd play a game where we try and see which doctor we most represent and most people have a strong connection to one of the archetypes.

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.

It's too early to tell, IMO. You had e.g. Newsom saying that MTF trans kids shouldn't play in sports for a bit, so Democratic politicians definitely were seeing the need for a course correction.

Unfortunately, it is (correctly) perceived that Trump has made a series of unnecessary self-owns, so now the "keep the same playbook and hope the ebb and flow of politics brings us back to power" segment has renewed leverage in the intra-party dispute. Mid-terms will determine which view gets to compete in 2028.

Somehow I doubt it, not for a long time. Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching. And there's tremendous demand from disappointed blues for copium media where they can comfort themselves that their beliefs are self-evidently true and their values virtuous.

Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.

The problem is that if you care about production chops and are not content to rewatch stuff you ALREADY like over and over again, what's the alternative? (Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)

Not that there is anything wrong with taking the high road and turning your back on media, but there's at least two good alternatives:

One: Watch old stuff. No, that's not the same as rewatching stuff you already like, because nobody has enough time to consume all the multiple lifetimes of classics that already exist.

If you are a science fiction fan, for example, can you seriously tell me that you have already watched all of Star Trek (the pre-Enterprise stuff), Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits? If you are a film buff, have you honestly already tried going down the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, or all Best Picture winners made before the year 2010? If you are an animation guy, have you truly already watched all 2D entries in the Disney Animated Canon, Don Bluth's entire filmography, and the standard recommendations of Gargoyles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the DCAU, as well as hidden gems like Exosquad?

I doubt it.

Two: Watch foreign media. The woke mind virus may have taken over the Anglosphere, but Asian stuff remains largely isolated. You could embrace the hallyu and watch one of the very nice K-dramas that are going around, most notably Squid Game. Or you could dive into anime, which is truly a completely different world; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:

The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.

In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.

I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.

Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.

Spectating, voyeurism is bad, robs you of life, time.

Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)

Bingo. Reading, working out, listening to music, doing hobbies, socializing with friends, etc. I haven't seriously watched anything since Twin Peaks: The Return.

Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.

They devour everything that Tylor Sheridan shits out. Btw - one has to wonder why he is rarely praised as a feminist, when he has the best written and not annoying female characters around.

I'm not a progressive and I wouldn't call myself a feminist either, but Sheridan also frequently has some of the worst written female characters around. The women were easily the worst part of "Landman", a show that is only watchable thanks to the Herculean efforts of Billy Bob Thornton.

I think what will force the reckoning is not sincere questions, but losing ground in the business. Not just “people don’t go see the Palestinian genocide narrative supporting Superman, but people actively choose to support superheroes who espouse things they actually believe in. Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to and I think they’ll at least downplay the Message. Have a pro-American, pro-Western Oikophillic Space Opera (maybe a revived Flash Gordon) release at the same time as Star Wars Old Republic, and when Star Wars flops, they might get the message.

For much too long, the Cathedral institutions have not faced an actual challenger. There are no real classical education modeled colleges and universities to challenge the chokehold that modern universities have on the student population. There aren’t many movies in mainstream distribution that really have traditional themes in them.

Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to and I think they’ll at least downplay the Message. Have a pro-American, pro-Western Oikophillic Space Opera (maybe a revived Flash Gordon) release at the same time as Star Wars Old Republic, and when Star Wars flops, they might get the message.

Which is why nobody in the movie biz is going to let that happen. I've read some stuff about how Hollywood works — and particularly the stranglehold of the Big Five - that make it clear the industry functions in many ways like a cartel (particularly in regards to distribution), making it incredibly difficult for "outsiders" to compete. To quote:

Since the dawn of filmmaking, the major American film studios have dominated both American cinema and the global film industry.[5][6] American studios have benefited from a strong first-mover advantage in that they were the first to industrialize filmmaking and master the art of mass-producing and distributing high-quality films with broad cross-cultural appeal.[7] Today, the Big Five majors – Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures – routinely distribute hundreds of films every year into all significant international markets (that is, where discretionary income is high enough for consumers to afford to watch films). The majors enjoy "significant internal economies of scale" from their "extensive and efficient [distribution] infrastructure,"[8] while it is "nearly impossible" for a film to reach a broad international theatrical audience without being first picked up by one of the majors for distribution.[4] Today, all the Big Five major studios are also members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to

This implies that Hollywood (and academia) will be the last to flip because no one else* is going to make $200 million movies regularly. It's just not viable.

You basically have to wait until an AI-driven paradigm shift can let weird nerds like Lucas make non-horror blockbusters for ~$60 million that look world class again.

* Well, maybe barring the Chinese.

I've seen a few YouTube folks commenting that the required budget to make a "real quality" film these days is surprisingly small. Technology has shrunk lots of things -- good cameras are affordable, decent CG and editing is doable on commodity machines, LED lighting is lighter and doesn't require huge generators and added cooling. Good screenwriting can't have changed in difficulty, can it?

But at the same time, it doesn't feel like we're in the promised golden age of DIY cinematic content. And there are plenty of folks making other sorts of videos, even really well produced ones. So I'm not quite sure what's missing.

I would think the answer is fairly simple - someone who could pull such a solo operation off would need almost polymath-levels of knowledge and skill - be capable of writing and directing and sound management and storyboarding AND managing CGI and and and-

That isn't to say it doesn't happen - Astartes comes to mind as the Ur example of the crazy stuff a single person can pull off nowadays - but even then it takes places in a well-established sandbox of a creative universe.

There are cases of people making movies with iPhones , so anything is possible. TV has gotten more ambitious and it may have made smaller movies cheaper to make. But VFX-heavy tentpoles seem to be another thing.

There's a ton of talent in this field, including some that are known for being very clear with their vision and so not prone to ballooning budgets. But even for people like Villeneuve who have shown they can work lean or allegedly modestly budgeted MCU flicks we end up ~180-200m. Given inflation that may be a cut but not as large as you'd need.

If anything, the big companies might be able to bully more work out of their contractors than a newcomer would. Victoria Alonso, who was recently booted from Marvel potentially as a scapegoat, was apparently notorious for wringing every bit of labour she could from VFX artists so she could get endless changes before she made a final decision

This is basically what happened with anime, right? Loads of people have switched from American stuff to Japanese stuff. But for various reasons that hasn't been interpreted as competition or a cultural signal.

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