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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.
It'd be from a Catholic perspective but the motivation wouldn't be uniquely Catholic, structural class resentment cuts across all the perspectives to provided the same motivation.
It's 'popular' entertainment and 'popular' culture. The slobs don't want to watch successful people succeeding.
I want to watch Johnny Lawrence kicking the shit out of short whiney Daniel LaRusso, but I'm tall and good looking. I'm not the target audience for much of popular entertainment.
Jews make more movies than Catholics or Blacks so we see more of their class resentment narrative.
If you want to see attractive successful people succeeding watch The Philadelphia Story, High Society, The Thin Man films or the Astaire-Rogers musicals, though portrayals of the successful succeeding are more common in literature than cinema.
Interesting fact about that film is that Daniel LaRusso's (who is an east-coast transplant) character name was originally written as Daniel Webber, implying another esoteric Jew-Aryan faceoff where the Jew wins and steals the Aryan's girlfriend to boot.
No. I want the small whiney kid to get his teeth kicked in.
The writer was Jewish and the story is allegedly semi-autobiographic.
It's a story for the small whiney kid, written by a whiney kid who makes himself the hero of his story.
Yup I misread.
Yes, exactly... These myths in popular culture have esoteric meaning, the characters represent ethnic conflict. In Karate Kid, in Revenge of the Nerds, in Happy Gilmore, in Caddyshack. It's an incredibly common and powerful mode of waging culture war. It matters who the producers have you rooting for and have you rooting against (spoiler they have you rooting for symbolic representations of themselves and against symbolic representations of you). It affects the psychology of the laity.
Every time I think you can't make the Jews look even cooler. Now you're telling me they were the ones who spared me from being subjected to endless cultural veneration of the big kid's boot on the small kid's face, forever?
Oh you were subjected to endless cultural veneration all right.
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