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Notes -
Wait for it... wait for it....
Ah, there it is.
Do you agree popular culture and Hollywood has engaged in consistent criticism of the WASP Country Club? Are you just going to point and sputter or participate in the conversation?
Point and sputter? Heh. Dude, you'd be more sufferable if you had some self-awareness and a sense of humor about it. If you can't put hands on keyboard without making it about Jews, just own it.
Making fun of WASP Country Club has been a thing for as long as there have been WASP Country Clubs (i.e., pretentious rich people to make fun of). Dickens did it. Austen did it. Freaking Tolstoy (one of the few people with less of a sense of humor than you who comes to mind) did it. Wodehouse definitely did it. It was not invented by Jews.
Can you elaborate on your argument? I've read Dickens but the mockery of the WASP country club that has been transmitted to me, and everybody else who hates Good Good for representing a "country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society)" has not come from Dickens, or Austen, or Tolstoy, it has come from difference sources, like the one I posted.
My argument is that country clubs are the modern representation of stuffy rich people. Ordinary folk have always loved making fun of stuffy rich people. The stereotype that rich people are assholes and stories about rich people being bested by pliebs is not a modern Jewish invention to subvert the white race. That you need this explained is my point about your Jew-obsession. If a Jew does anything, anywhere, it doesn't matter why he did it or that other people do it too, in your world he did it for nefarious Jew reasons. Story written by a Jew? There's an anti-white message somewhere. Film featuring a Jewish comedian? It's anti-white. No matter how tortured the interpretation, you'll find some anti-goy propaganda somewhere. In this case, there weren't even any Jews involved AFAIK, so you had to reach for a totally unrelated work that happened to have a Jew in it.
MadMonzer is right, and I'd go further, the authors you're citing aren't one tradition.
Austen and Wodehouse were mocking from the inside. Austen was inside the gentry's world, writing for people who knew its rules and her targets are the Mr. Collinses who play the game badly, not the game. Bertie Wooster is affectionate self-parody. The jokes land because the audience knows the rules.
"Stuffy" is the view from outside. If you don't know why the norms exist, all you see is the fence. You know you're outside it, but not what it's for or that it was never built with you in mind. The norms had a purpose, elaborate decorum takes years to fake, it screened for people shaped by institution, when business ran on reputation and a handshake. Understatement, discretion, not talking about money, these keep a small closed world functional across fifty-year relationships. The same code is also a moat against new money.
The insider satire says "this person is playing our game badly." The slobs-vs-snobs stuff says "the game is fake and the players are frauds." Dickens does some of the latter; Austen and Wodehouse mostly don't. Mocking the country club as presumptively illegitimate isn't a continuation of Austen. It's throwing stones from the outside from the 'money can't buy class' set.
That said I'd never seen nor heard of Good Good, it seemed like poor improv or sketch comedy to me. Are we supposed to desire the possessed driver? Is it like the ring from LotR? It didn't make me want to try the driver or see any of their other work. Perhaps someone could like the best example of their work.
Oh, absolutely not. My point wasn't that Austen and Tolstoy and Wodehouse were writing the same thing (I deliberately chose some very unlike authors) - my point was that SS is trying to gesture at a particular theme in fiction being a nefarious Jewish anti-white agenda (even if it's non-Jews doing it, they're only doing it because of Da Joos), and I'm saying it is none of those things. Even if you distinguish between "mocking from the inside" from "mocking from the outside," Jews are not the ones who began the trend of mocking from the outside, and outsiders throwing stones at a structure they consider illegitimate is not a uniquely Jewish (or woke, or anti-white) phenomenon.
Before he responded I was going to say that his dog-whistle was to subtle for me, but I see he has made it plainer now.
While I don't think he's totally off base I think he's neglecting other excluded groups. It wasn't only the Jews excludeed from the country club it was often the Catholics and Negroes too, other loud and emotional cultures. I think it's challenging to attempt to separate the cultural, class, or ethnic motivations for this.
Slobs-vs-snobs is a trope not infrequently depicted in popular culture. I don't think it's an organized conspiracy. Counter examples seems rare Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, is one.
I mean yeah, if Catholics made Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore with Catholic protagonists wouldn't the analysis apply there the same? Wouldn't you agree the film/mockery/criticism is derived from the Catholic perspective in that case? I wouldn't call it an "organized conspiracy" to note that the films in those cases would have been motivated by the Catholic perspective of a cultural conflict, a perspective which they then transmit to mass audiences via popular culture like the very movies that are so iconic.
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