Exactly as you said here in America....you can accurately without fail predict how the plot of any randomly chosen TV drama will progress by skin color, sex, perhaps income levels etc...dreary crap which I've long ago given up watching.
Late to this, but making my way through your posts. Everywhere we see victim narratives constructed to obtain unearned resources, and the wilfully stupid or strategically ignorant don't care about real statistics. So glad to see your substack. You'll laugh at this: I work in marketing and had an agency do a campaign for me (a Lithuanian organization). They peopled my adverts with a demographic not represented in our organization and when I mentioned they would need to rework the whole campaign it caused a frisson amongst the woke creative one of whom said they would not work with me in future. I told them next time to read the brief and thanks to the fellow who remove himself from my creative team. But it did not make me popular. Apparently I used my privilege to punch down. Daft.
Your experience confirms what I've always thought about advertising 'creatives'; that they are often in a parallel universe to the business that commissions them and aren't in its best interests... Gillette and Budweiser spring to mind.
Oct 17, 2023·edited Oct 17, 2023Liked by Graham Cunningham
We have spent too long as a society at the top of the pyramid of needs. This would make them think that their point of view supersedes the directions and instruction of the person who’s paying. People have forgotten / some have never experienced what it means to be at the bottom rung where food and shelter are priorities. I’m not actually advocating for annihilation of the economic health of our country, but some of these See You Next Tuesday”’s need a freaking wake up call.
Hi Graham, I totally feel the same way about television. I stopped watching main stream shows just about twenty years ago. I had a very early morning job and could not stay awake.
I retired early two years ago with more free time, the change was startling. So when I read your article I felt not so alone. I cannot stomach it. I point it out often to my adult daughter and she thinks I am narrow minded.
Interesting enough I found myself watching more and more British shows. They seem more real. I am selective though. The police and your legal system seems way more lax or forgiving than here in America.
I remember being very frightened for Vera as she chased a murderer up some very dark castle on a hill with out a gun to protect herself!
Movies and such from the Nordic countries are even more strange. The people all seem to be androgynous.
Interesting! We watch Vera as a kind of safe bet because it's the least pc and least stupid of the UK police dramas. We used to gravitate to the Nordic ones but they've tended now to become more and more gratuitously gory. The best UK drama if you can get it in the US is the stuff made ten to twenty years ago..... the Catherine Cookson feature-length ones for example are great stories, way better than anything made now.
Oh my goodness, I was just thinking about the SJW messaging of TV after watching the latest season of Unforgotten! It was a super box ticker: biracial woman beats her (much larger, very loving white) husband, and has been addicted to alcohol because she was raised by her working class, fundamentalist Christian Nigerian immigrant grandparents who resented her because her birth - to their unwed (raped by a white aristocrat [I’m not making this up!]) teenaged daughter - brought them shame. The unwed mother was so hopeless in the evil London of the ‘60s that she “threw herself into the Thames”.
The Victim biracial child of the rape confronts her aristocrat father (who grew from a rapist youth into an evil, social program slashing Tory Minister [I am not making this up!]) and blackmails him into providing her with a monthly allowance (but apparently not enough to pay for the counselling that she says at one point, her benefits don’t cover). His dirty money does not seem to improve her Victim life very much.
She has a daughter with FASD but it’s not because the paragon of virtue Victim drank any alcohol while a pregnant teen mom. Perish the thought!It’s because her fundamentalist Christian Nigerian grandfather forced her to drink a shit ton of vodka to terminate her pregnancy (you know how fundamentalist Christians love abortion?!) and it didn’t work. She gave birth to the FASD baby, who joined a cult (led by a white middle aged predator who impregnated her as a teen [I am not making this up!]) and was pretty much out of the Victim mother’s life until she became the victim of the murder which this story is about.
I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, but it’s a beaut. Brilliant female Irish DCI and her even smarter, male Pakistani DI (who has a white fiancée, he’s no bigot!) obtain a confession from the evil Tory Minister who has lately changed his public spending habits because he sees the terrible impact that his party’s low public spending has had in the (racialized) community) that his own hidden Victim’s family lives in. But the brave and politically correct cops tell the evil Tory aristocrat that they see him! His recent public spending spree cannot atone for his Tory sins! He will pay for what he did!! And he does. Wracked no doubt by White Guilt, he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Because he knows that every bad thing that has happened to his hidden family is ultimately his fault. As are all the problems of everyone in Britain who is smart enough to see that they too are victims of the oppressive capitalist system in which they suffer daily.
The evolution of the relationship between the two cops did redeem this series a wee bit. But not enough.
The bit about the Victim’s Christian grandfather forcing Vodka on her was just too much for me. Nothing could be her own fault. Every bad thing she did was attributable to another (bad, conservative) person’s actions.
And I didn’t even mention the scene with the (unattractive, selfish, old) Tory wife. You know, the one where the self righteous Victim stops the wife from “throwing in her face” the fact that the faultless Victim engaged in blackmail and did not seem to have gained anything from the money she took. The whole thing was a super victim/oppressor story.
Oh, and the “upskirting” Polish, Jewish character, who felt so horrible for the “damage” his photos did (to women who didn’t even know he had taken photos of them?!) What the heck was that?! Was it meant to be a social justice parody?
Yes our culture's got itself into a strange, sad place hasn't it? In a way it seems like masochism - middle-class white masochism. But then it's PROXY-masochism - as in you personally are a 'nice person'; its all your white peers who are 'deplorables'. Thanks for the sub by the way.
Thinking about the Polish character: another example of a semi-criminal white guy getting caught by his own weakness? also just to expand the story line and provide additional avenues of "investigation", plus provide the opportunity for pathos when the detective is on the train to Europe and learns his girlfriend miscarried, and he is too far away to comfort her? Unbelievable misfortune on all sides??!! Plus, I don't recall the details but perhaps the Polish interviewee provided some time line specifics helpful to getting the (near) final history? :-)
We watched that here in US recently, too. Once you get sucked into the story line, you just let the PC'ness and Wokeness roll over you. But it should be added to your summary that the evil white guy confessing in the end was due in part to his knowing that he would not have long to live, or serve in prison, anyway.
A brilliant article Graham. I tend to watch old dramas these days because ironically they seem less prejudiced when taken in the round. Also, there are some excellent new, foreign dramas on Netflix if you can deal with the subtitles.
Thank you. Yes we tend to gravitate towards the ones before everthing had to tick every pc box....also less gruesome murders. We also watch European dramas (on C4). Some are good but - as with the UK - the plot-line is nearly always about murder (or serial murder) these days.
The best fiction focuses more on human reality than on political programs, but politics often leaks in. Brainwashing needs either willing participants or total control. It’s pretty easy to turn off the television or set aside rank propaganda, I think. But I agree it’s annoying, no matter what soap they’re selling. Thanks for writing this.
Wonderful essay, Graham. I agree with the major thrust of it. But, as you might expect, I have some minor quibbles.
I’m a huge fan of John le Carré and Little Drummer Girl is perhaps my favourite book of his. The theme of it (SPOILERS) is that Charlie (the main character) is overwhelmed by ambiguity. She is a massive supporter of the Palestinians and yet she is recruited by the Israeli secret service to spy and assassinate on their behalf. The book sucks the reader into this ambiguity and half the time you don't know if you are pro- or anti- the good guys or the bad guys and you often can’t decide which is which. I thought the recent TV drama captured this ambiguity very well. Of course, it was sympathetic to the Palestinians. So was Charlie. I doubt that le Carré was woke when he wrote this. The book certainly wasn't and neither was the TV series.
The Night Manager tv series was not that great but of course the bad guys were white. To switch them to another shade would have betrayed the original story and would have been identity politics in the other direction. I still agree with the thrust of your point but you just chose two bad examples, is all.
A last point that’s more supportive of your argument: my wife does a lot of extra work for movies and TV and very often many of the other extras are people of colour. The extras all know each other and the POCs get called way more than she does - even for things like a drama set in WW1. She got her own back though when she was Black Woman Number 12 on the Windrush because they didn't have enough black extras.
I think the real problem is media-people groupthink....and that is perhaps where you and I find some common ground. In my recollection The Night Manager was dripping with it. I recall one reviewer (I think it was the leftish Nick Cohen) taking Le Carre to task for picking on the whiteys because that was the safe bet, rather than the Islamists who might have put a fatwa on him. That seemed to me well said.
Off on a tangent: I think discussions about Lefties and conservatives often get bedevilled by how much these terms have come to be redefined. 50 years ago 'Left' was primarily about class inequality...nationalisation + welfare....up the workers etc. 'Right' meant Toryism, capitalism + welfare (just not too much) etc. Now 'the Left' is taken to mean a primarily middle class graduate 'social justice'-about-identity thing. And conservatives (ones like me anyway) have somewhat parted company with both Toryism and capitalism and are more rooted in an Edmund Burkean interrogation along the lines of "careful what you wish for Liberalism". Hope this makes sense.
I agree with all your points, Graham, and, in particular, I agree that social justice has been associated with the left but my agenda is to make it known that there are plenty of us old-school lefties still around.
I have some sympathy for your Burkean interrogation and share much of it.
All very true. I can smell this crap a mile away and avoid it like the plague. At the first hint of a girlboss, a lovely gay couple, or a saintly Negro, I change the channel. writers enslaved to The Message have nothing to offer.
There’s another important propaganda angle to Law & Order: it is a full on assault against the US Bill of Rights. At every turn, fundamental constitutional rights are presented as rules the government must transgress to obtain justice.
The right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to counsel, the right to due process, the right against self-incrimination, etc. These rights are cast as a recurring villain throughout the series. And that’s no accident.
Excellent essay! Screenwriters have long known the technique of writing "subtext," which in its benign form can simply mean adding a layer of depth to a character or scene beyond the obvious. In its darker manifestations—especially since the cultural coup of the radical Left—it leads to a quasi-Soviet subtle indoctrination of the kind you explain so well. Given that the arts in the West has no been taken over by these types, it's no surprise that the lion's share of funding and awards goes to those ticking off the "correct" boxes. In a recent report on Redacted, journalist Natali Morris showed a list that is now used by the Motion Picture Industry Association of America to set criteria for which movies can be nominated for Academy Awards. Surprise, surprise—they tick all the same boxes you mention. I wonder how future historians will be able to sort out the truth when so much of the information stream is corrupted.
For years I have been able to predict who the killer/torturer/insane/evil person was going to be in any police drama...watch for a white, male, "Christian" person being introduced into the story. It's even better if they're a preacher waving a Bible.
As a result of cesspool level programming I've not watched network fare for a long time.
Decided this was the only output I wanted to check out from your 2023 revisit sequence. Too little time! I did enjoy some of your phrasings but won't bother to try highlighting them here/ now.
Concur much of the bi/multi/ xyz family or group gatherings shown in much advertising is distorting and somewhat disturbing (when you can't fast forward through it), also in the US.
Only question becomes is this faulty portrayal supposed to align whites and straights to "get with the program" that is coming their way? Or is it to bolster the views of blacks, et al., that they too can achieve middle class prosperity and are fully justified in aspiring to do so?
If the latter, it would be good to have these ads show more "minority" group children [all children actually] doing homework rather than cavorting with the rest of the family in front of the TV. Stress the real success factors [education, skills/job, marriage, then kids], not the generosity of government or the advertiser.
From this side of the pond, it is basically terrifying to consider that the Rotherham sex trafficking story seems to be true and that even national level exposure did not bring national level police attention to bear sooner. But I don't really know the later details or history of the story or the results. Is (has) justice being (been) served yet?
Advertising's faulty portrayal: I know some people read into this some kind of marketing strategy but my own hunch is that the world of the advertising agency 'creative' is very young, bratish and up-itself and operates as a parallel universe to the businesses that employ it. They get away with this stuff mainly because those on the business side probably don't pay that much attention to their ad men and any effect on the 'bottom line'. More broadly speaking I think all large corporations including capitalist ones usually become a dysfunctional mish-mash of departmental tribes that don't much connect up with each other.
Rotherham: This was (is) replicated in many other UK towns and cities with large Pakistani populations. It is almost too depressing for me to want to even think about. The dysfunction of the British police culture.... dim-witted-meets-political-correctness is beyond parody.
'Too depressing for me to want to even think about it'. Early morning, my husband reading the news reads out 'four migrants rape 13 year old girl in Newcastle'. It never ends. There is a view that the hard left actually enjoy destroying, they get kicks from causing pain, smashing beautiful people and beautiful things, like bitter peasants turning on not just the Royals in 'revolutionary' France and Russia, but anything and anyone. The brutalist architecture of miserable towns in Soviet Union repeated in miserable towns in Britain, deliberately to rot people's souls and demoralise them, leftist architects incapable of creating anything beautiful. One of my 'favourites' is Sussex Heights in Brighton, a massive, ugly, ugly, ugly 26 floor carbuncle tower block built on the site of a church (hmmm) completely out of scale to its surroundings, trampling over the surrounding beautiful architecture of a much better age (yes it was) and RIGHT IN THE EYE LINE of Clifton Terrace, a most stunning Regency work of art, built on high ground to enjoy distant views of the sea. A sort of 'fuck beauty forever' from the nasty little socialists of the 1960's.
I don't think the woke whiteys actually INTEND to do harm (the Islamists do of course)... it's more a kind of mass psychosis. I think a very large proportion of people (even bright ones) are intellectual sheep.... they follow fashion. The root of all this madness is the intelligentsia in the universities and for 50 years now all bright young people have been through academia's lefty sheep dip
Regarding mad architecture, have a look at my 'Deconstructing Deconstructivism' essay. But maybe wait till you're feeling upbeat...I wouldn't want to spoil your morning!!
I was cunning, note I said 'the hard left', that is the people pulling the strings. Sure, the Woke kids, virtue signallers and useful idiots don't mean harm, they're doing it for facebook 'likes' and peer approval but a few layers up the chain are the nasties controlling them. I've met quite a few, face to face, I don't think they even have warm blood in their veins, still pursuing their student days wet dream of socialist nirvana, bitter that they are torn apart by their own hate, tormented by realities of conservative success in all things versus the imagined perfection but failures of socialism. They are the embodiment of the man in a washing basket saying, 'I could have lifted myself off the floor if the handles hadn't broken'. Old Yuri nailed it: https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q?si=VuWvAA_4iU_g_h8J
Nothing more annoying than to sit down to be entertained by a good drama... only to become painfully aware of the ‘ticking of the boxes’!
Thanks Lisa. So does this get me a free sub to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ ?
It all helps.
Exactly as you said here in America....you can accurately without fail predict how the plot of any randomly chosen TV drama will progress by skin color, sex, perhaps income levels etc...dreary crap which I've long ago given up watching.
Late to this, but making my way through your posts. Everywhere we see victim narratives constructed to obtain unearned resources, and the wilfully stupid or strategically ignorant don't care about real statistics. So glad to see your substack. You'll laugh at this: I work in marketing and had an agency do a campaign for me (a Lithuanian organization). They peopled my adverts with a demographic not represented in our organization and when I mentioned they would need to rework the whole campaign it caused a frisson amongst the woke creative one of whom said they would not work with me in future. I told them next time to read the brief and thanks to the fellow who remove himself from my creative team. But it did not make me popular. Apparently I used my privilege to punch down. Daft.
Your experience confirms what I've always thought about advertising 'creatives'; that they are often in a parallel universe to the business that commissions them and aren't in its best interests... Gillette and Budweiser spring to mind.
We have spent too long as a society at the top of the pyramid of needs. This would make them think that their point of view supersedes the directions and instruction of the person who’s paying. People have forgotten / some have never experienced what it means to be at the bottom rung where food and shelter are priorities. I’m not actually advocating for annihilation of the economic health of our country, but some of these See You Next Tuesday”’s need a freaking wake up call.
Hi Graham, I totally feel the same way about television. I stopped watching main stream shows just about twenty years ago. I had a very early morning job and could not stay awake.
I retired early two years ago with more free time, the change was startling. So when I read your article I felt not so alone. I cannot stomach it. I point it out often to my adult daughter and she thinks I am narrow minded.
Interesting enough I found myself watching more and more British shows. They seem more real. I am selective though. The police and your legal system seems way more lax or forgiving than here in America.
I remember being very frightened for Vera as she chased a murderer up some very dark castle on a hill with out a gun to protect herself!
Movies and such from the Nordic countries are even more strange. The people all seem to be androgynous.
Interesting! We watch Vera as a kind of safe bet because it's the least pc and least stupid of the UK police dramas. We used to gravitate to the Nordic ones but they've tended now to become more and more gratuitously gory. The best UK drama if you can get it in the US is the stuff made ten to twenty years ago..... the Catherine Cookson feature-length ones for example are great stories, way better than anything made now.
Sounds exactly like American entertainment.
Oh my goodness, I was just thinking about the SJW messaging of TV after watching the latest season of Unforgotten! It was a super box ticker: biracial woman beats her (much larger, very loving white) husband, and has been addicted to alcohol because she was raised by her working class, fundamentalist Christian Nigerian immigrant grandparents who resented her because her birth - to their unwed (raped by a white aristocrat [I’m not making this up!]) teenaged daughter - brought them shame. The unwed mother was so hopeless in the evil London of the ‘60s that she “threw herself into the Thames”.
The Victim biracial child of the rape confronts her aristocrat father (who grew from a rapist youth into an evil, social program slashing Tory Minister [I am not making this up!]) and blackmails him into providing her with a monthly allowance (but apparently not enough to pay for the counselling that she says at one point, her benefits don’t cover). His dirty money does not seem to improve her Victim life very much.
She has a daughter with FASD but it’s not because the paragon of virtue Victim drank any alcohol while a pregnant teen mom. Perish the thought!It’s because her fundamentalist Christian Nigerian grandfather forced her to drink a shit ton of vodka to terminate her pregnancy (you know how fundamentalist Christians love abortion?!) and it didn’t work. She gave birth to the FASD baby, who joined a cult (led by a white middle aged predator who impregnated her as a teen [I am not making this up!]) and was pretty much out of the Victim mother’s life until she became the victim of the murder which this story is about.
I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, but it’s a beaut. Brilliant female Irish DCI and her even smarter, male Pakistani DI (who has a white fiancée, he’s no bigot!) obtain a confession from the evil Tory Minister who has lately changed his public spending habits because he sees the terrible impact that his party’s low public spending has had in the (racialized) community) that his own hidden Victim’s family lives in. But the brave and politically correct cops tell the evil Tory aristocrat that they see him! His recent public spending spree cannot atone for his Tory sins! He will pay for what he did!! And he does. Wracked no doubt by White Guilt, he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Because he knows that every bad thing that has happened to his hidden family is ultimately his fault. As are all the problems of everyone in Britain who is smart enough to see that they too are victims of the oppressive capitalist system in which they suffer daily.
The evolution of the relationship between the two cops did redeem this series a wee bit. But not enough.
Thanks for this....quite a SJW tick-box jamboree that!
Hope this will persuade you to add STB to your free Substack subscriptions.
Subscribed!
The bit about the Victim’s Christian grandfather forcing Vodka on her was just too much for me. Nothing could be her own fault. Every bad thing she did was attributable to another (bad, conservative) person’s actions.
And I didn’t even mention the scene with the (unattractive, selfish, old) Tory wife. You know, the one where the self righteous Victim stops the wife from “throwing in her face” the fact that the faultless Victim engaged in blackmail and did not seem to have gained anything from the money she took. The whole thing was a super victim/oppressor story.
Oh, and the “upskirting” Polish, Jewish character, who felt so horrible for the “damage” his photos did (to women who didn’t even know he had taken photos of them?!) What the heck was that?! Was it meant to be a social justice parody?
Yes our culture's got itself into a strange, sad place hasn't it? In a way it seems like masochism - middle-class white masochism. But then it's PROXY-masochism - as in you personally are a 'nice person'; its all your white peers who are 'deplorables'. Thanks for the sub by the way.
Thinking about the Polish character: another example of a semi-criminal white guy getting caught by his own weakness? also just to expand the story line and provide additional avenues of "investigation", plus provide the opportunity for pathos when the detective is on the train to Europe and learns his girlfriend miscarried, and he is too far away to comfort her? Unbelievable misfortune on all sides??!! Plus, I don't recall the details but perhaps the Polish interviewee provided some time line specifics helpful to getting the (near) final history? :-)
We watched that here in US recently, too. Once you get sucked into the story line, you just let the PC'ness and Wokeness roll over you. But it should be added to your summary that the evil white guy confessing in the end was due in part to his knowing that he would not have long to live, or serve in prison, anyway.
Good addition
A brilliant article Graham. I tend to watch old dramas these days because ironically they seem less prejudiced when taken in the round. Also, there are some excellent new, foreign dramas on Netflix if you can deal with the subtitles.
Thank you. Yes we tend to gravitate towards the ones before everthing had to tick every pc box....also less gruesome murders. We also watch European dramas (on C4). Some are good but - as with the UK - the plot-line is nearly always about murder (or serial murder) these days.
Oh! Fauda is excellent!!
The best fiction focuses more on human reality than on political programs, but politics often leaks in. Brainwashing needs either willing participants or total control. It’s pretty easy to turn off the television or set aside rank propaganda, I think. But I agree it’s annoying, no matter what soap they’re selling. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks...for the 'Like'. Hope you will maybe also press the 'Subscribe'? and add STB to your other free reads.
An OUTSTANDING essay!
Thank you!
Wonderful essay, Graham. I agree with the major thrust of it. But, as you might expect, I have some minor quibbles.
I’m a huge fan of John le Carré and Little Drummer Girl is perhaps my favourite book of his. The theme of it (SPOILERS) is that Charlie (the main character) is overwhelmed by ambiguity. She is a massive supporter of the Palestinians and yet she is recruited by the Israeli secret service to spy and assassinate on their behalf. The book sucks the reader into this ambiguity and half the time you don't know if you are pro- or anti- the good guys or the bad guys and you often can’t decide which is which. I thought the recent TV drama captured this ambiguity very well. Of course, it was sympathetic to the Palestinians. So was Charlie. I doubt that le Carré was woke when he wrote this. The book certainly wasn't and neither was the TV series.
The Night Manager tv series was not that great but of course the bad guys were white. To switch them to another shade would have betrayed the original story and would have been identity politics in the other direction. I still agree with the thrust of your point but you just chose two bad examples, is all.
A last point that’s more supportive of your argument: my wife does a lot of extra work for movies and TV and very often many of the other extras are people of colour. The extras all know each other and the POCs get called way more than she does - even for things like a drama set in WW1. She got her own back though when she was Black Woman Number 12 on the Windrush because they didn't have enough black extras.
I think the real problem is media-people groupthink....and that is perhaps where you and I find some common ground. In my recollection The Night Manager was dripping with it. I recall one reviewer (I think it was the leftish Nick Cohen) taking Le Carre to task for picking on the whiteys because that was the safe bet, rather than the Islamists who might have put a fatwa on him. That seemed to me well said.
Off on a tangent: I think discussions about Lefties and conservatives often get bedevilled by how much these terms have come to be redefined. 50 years ago 'Left' was primarily about class inequality...nationalisation + welfare....up the workers etc. 'Right' meant Toryism, capitalism + welfare (just not too much) etc. Now 'the Left' is taken to mean a primarily middle class graduate 'social justice'-about-identity thing. And conservatives (ones like me anyway) have somewhat parted company with both Toryism and capitalism and are more rooted in an Edmund Burkean interrogation along the lines of "careful what you wish for Liberalism". Hope this makes sense.
I agree with all your points, Graham, and, in particular, I agree that social justice has been associated with the left but my agenda is to make it known that there are plenty of us old-school lefties still around.
I have some sympathy for your Burkean interrogation and share much of it.
Good news!! The movie “Quiz Lady” is just plain funny and also sweet, without being sappy. It
also pokes a bit of fun at grievance culture and ubiquitous false claims of racism. And it has Will Ferrell in it. Highly recommend!
All very true. I can smell this crap a mile away and avoid it like the plague. At the first hint of a girlboss, a lovely gay couple, or a saintly Negro, I change the channel. writers enslaved to The Message have nothing to offer.
There’s another important propaganda angle to Law & Order: it is a full on assault against the US Bill of Rights. At every turn, fundamental constitutional rights are presented as rules the government must transgress to obtain justice.
The right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to counsel, the right to due process, the right against self-incrimination, etc. These rights are cast as a recurring villain throughout the series. And that’s no accident.
Excellent essay! Screenwriters have long known the technique of writing "subtext," which in its benign form can simply mean adding a layer of depth to a character or scene beyond the obvious. In its darker manifestations—especially since the cultural coup of the radical Left—it leads to a quasi-Soviet subtle indoctrination of the kind you explain so well. Given that the arts in the West has no been taken over by these types, it's no surprise that the lion's share of funding and awards goes to those ticking off the "correct" boxes. In a recent report on Redacted, journalist Natali Morris showed a list that is now used by the Motion Picture Industry Association of America to set criteria for which movies can be nominated for Academy Awards. Surprise, surprise—they tick all the same boxes you mention. I wonder how future historians will be able to sort out the truth when so much of the information stream is corrupted.
For years I have been able to predict who the killer/torturer/insane/evil person was going to be in any police drama...watch for a white, male, "Christian" person being introduced into the story. It's even better if they're a preacher waving a Bible.
As a result of cesspool level programming I've not watched network fare for a long time.
Decided this was the only output I wanted to check out from your 2023 revisit sequence. Too little time! I did enjoy some of your phrasings but won't bother to try highlighting them here/ now.
Concur much of the bi/multi/ xyz family or group gatherings shown in much advertising is distorting and somewhat disturbing (when you can't fast forward through it), also in the US.
Only question becomes is this faulty portrayal supposed to align whites and straights to "get with the program" that is coming their way? Or is it to bolster the views of blacks, et al., that they too can achieve middle class prosperity and are fully justified in aspiring to do so?
If the latter, it would be good to have these ads show more "minority" group children [all children actually] doing homework rather than cavorting with the rest of the family in front of the TV. Stress the real success factors [education, skills/job, marriage, then kids], not the generosity of government or the advertiser.
From this side of the pond, it is basically terrifying to consider that the Rotherham sex trafficking story seems to be true and that even national level exposure did not bring national level police attention to bear sooner. But I don't really know the later details or history of the story or the results. Is (has) justice being (been) served yet?
Advertising's faulty portrayal: I know some people read into this some kind of marketing strategy but my own hunch is that the world of the advertising agency 'creative' is very young, bratish and up-itself and operates as a parallel universe to the businesses that employ it. They get away with this stuff mainly because those on the business side probably don't pay that much attention to their ad men and any effect on the 'bottom line'. More broadly speaking I think all large corporations including capitalist ones usually become a dysfunctional mish-mash of departmental tribes that don't much connect up with each other.
Rotherham: This was (is) replicated in many other UK towns and cities with large Pakistani populations. It is almost too depressing for me to want to even think about. The dysfunction of the British police culture.... dim-witted-meets-political-correctness is beyond parody.
'Too depressing for me to want to even think about it'. Early morning, my husband reading the news reads out 'four migrants rape 13 year old girl in Newcastle'. It never ends. There is a view that the hard left actually enjoy destroying, they get kicks from causing pain, smashing beautiful people and beautiful things, like bitter peasants turning on not just the Royals in 'revolutionary' France and Russia, but anything and anyone. The brutalist architecture of miserable towns in Soviet Union repeated in miserable towns in Britain, deliberately to rot people's souls and demoralise them, leftist architects incapable of creating anything beautiful. One of my 'favourites' is Sussex Heights in Brighton, a massive, ugly, ugly, ugly 26 floor carbuncle tower block built on the site of a church (hmmm) completely out of scale to its surroundings, trampling over the surrounding beautiful architecture of a much better age (yes it was) and RIGHT IN THE EYE LINE of Clifton Terrace, a most stunning Regency work of art, built on high ground to enjoy distant views of the sea. A sort of 'fuck beauty forever' from the nasty little socialists of the 1960's.
I don't think the woke whiteys actually INTEND to do harm (the Islamists do of course)... it's more a kind of mass psychosis. I think a very large proportion of people (even bright ones) are intellectual sheep.... they follow fashion. The root of all this madness is the intelligentsia in the universities and for 50 years now all bright young people have been through academia's lefty sheep dip
Regarding mad architecture, have a look at my 'Deconstructing Deconstructivism' essay. But maybe wait till you're feeling upbeat...I wouldn't want to spoil your morning!!
I was cunning, note I said 'the hard left', that is the people pulling the strings. Sure, the Woke kids, virtue signallers and useful idiots don't mean harm, they're doing it for facebook 'likes' and peer approval but a few layers up the chain are the nasties controlling them. I've met quite a few, face to face, I don't think they even have warm blood in their veins, still pursuing their student days wet dream of socialist nirvana, bitter that they are torn apart by their own hate, tormented by realities of conservative success in all things versus the imagined perfection but failures of socialism. They are the embodiment of the man in a washing basket saying, 'I could have lifted myself off the floor if the handles hadn't broken'. Old Yuri nailed it: https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q?si=VuWvAA_4iU_g_h8J
And the new Yuri!