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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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a strong flawless black female super-scientist who kills conservative white men

Isn't that Glass Onion, more or less? The super-scientist is replaced by her twin sister, and she doesn't actually kill the white guy in the end, but she burns the Mona Lisa and leads an orgy of destructive glass-smashing.

That video is a bit New Pagan; there weren't really Celtic Christmas traditions since Christmas as such wasn't a Celtic tradition. Germanic and Northern Europeans traditions do exist, but the fudge-up in that video about the Scots and Hogmanay is terrible. Norse Trolls, Old English, and Lalland Scots all mixed up to try and prove that Hogmanay as a New Year's Celebration is actually the Winter Solstice which is actually Christmas. As for the Fomorians being trolls - go away for yourself 🤣 New Age Pagan stuff is really trying to prove too much that all Christian feasts are really pagan in origin.

Sensitivity readers are not trying to preserve anything, as you can see from their use in YA literature. This is publishers trying to wring the last few coins out of existing properties before they expire. Roald Dahl, as a children's author, is pretty much more likely to survive than Ian Fleming. You won't read the Bond novels because you have the movies, which in some ways are better. You may very well keep on reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" despite the remake movie.

As for Hamilton, yes, I noticed the sudden U-turn on "greatest musical ever" to "celebration of horribleness that should be cancelled", but I don't think that was a concerted hard leftist campaign. Lin-Manuel Miranda became Problematic largely because he became so freakin' successful, and the 'crabs in the bucket' paradigm started. He wasn't Afro-Latino, how dare he presume to represent those people! This was colorism! Miranda was from a privileged background! Basically jealousy in action. And of course all the nice white allies fell in line.

And that's been my experience of sensitivity readers - they started out in YA and allied genres, and now are moving into mainstream work. A lot of envious little wannabe writers started pulling down others who were getting contracts and announcing publishing deals, and set themselves up as arbiters about what could and could not be written, especially by white authors. I remember from a few years back someone on Tumblr who was allegedly Chinese-American doing pages and pages of instructions about "you can't say this, you can't say this, you can't say this". Some of it was informative, e.g. about Chinese naming conventions and why historically Chinese people would never do the equivalent of naming their kids after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but it pretty much was a grift; the advice in the end was to consult a Real Chinese or other Asian Person to look over your writing for you and correct it, and of course you should pay them generously for the privilege of insulting you.

You can get ten different "sensitivity readers" who are Real Trans or Real Latinx or whatever, and they'll all give contradictory advice about what you can and can't include, so whatever you do, you'll get into trouble. I think mainstream publishers are a little at the mercy of blackmail campaigns: hire us on as sensitivity readers or else we'll conduct a PR campaign about how you're horrible racists and transphobes and all the rest of it. It's not about preservation in even a sanitised form, it's about the money.