By David Futrelle
It isn’t just the white supremacists who are mad about Bird Box. No, it turns out that at least one black supremacist has some big problems with the Netflix post-apocalyptic horror hit as well. And his issues with the film are even weirder than theirs.
Some white supremacists are taking aim at Bird Box, as I noted in a recent post, because they think the film — whose most heroic figures are a white women and a black man — is some sort of SJW propaganda designed to denigrate the straight white male.
But the black conspiracy theorist behind the virulently anti-white and anti-Semitic Race Rules blog is angry at the film because he doesn’t think the handsome black hero of the film would really be into “preggo over-the-hill skank Sandra Bullock” who “looks like a damn tr***y.”
Mr. Race Rules starts off by noting that he doesn’t like “race-mixing” in movies because there really is no such thing in the real world. Strap yourself in here, folks, because this is where things start to get really weird. “[T]he so-called races are actually different species,” he writes.
Blacks are the only humans and everyone else are all animal humanoid hybrids or what I call manimals.
And even though Sandra Bullock’s self-sacrificing boyfriend in the film, played by Trevante Rhodes, presumably doesn’t believe that white people are literal “manimals,” Mr. Race Rules still doesn’t believe that “someone as good looking as that brother” would want anything to do with
a pregnant, pale, curveless, pig-nose beast like Sandra Bullock in real life … Black men that are attractive rarely go after skanks unless they have been hurt by black women, they are drunk or high or just goddamn brainwashed to fuck manimal bitches for some reason like porn.
Love that he manages to blame black women for what he sees as Rhodes’ poor romantic choice. Weird how dudes who rail against the alleged evils of white women — regardless of their own race or political views — almost always seem to hate black women at least as much, if not more.
Mr. Race Rules is also annoyed that Rhodes’ character turns out to be what today’s white supremacists would call a cuck — raising kids fathered by men of a different race. Sorry, species.
To make matters worse the dumb ass nigga was going to be raising two white kids with a white woman as a black man. What the fuck is that? Reverse reparations?!?!? I’ll never take care of some white bastard kid. She didn’t even want them herself just like most white females who always pretend to love their kids. Ain’t buyin’ it. White females are full of shit…..literally and figuratively.
Despite the much-discussed diversity of the Bird Box cast of main characters, there are no black women in roles more prominent than “Woman in Entryway.” Mr. Race Rules thinks he knows why.
“Did anyone notice this one last very important thing?!?!?” he asks.
NO BLACK WOMEN!!!!!!! That was no fucking accident. The elite worship the black woman. It is their doorway to the future through the black womb since pinkazoids are all dying out….much of it from their own compulsive self-extermination.
Wat.
They never want to disrespect the black womb-man too much on the big screen because they know where we all come from. There’s no problem slaughtering and incarcerating record numbers of black and Latino males but they have to protect the black womb to ensure their genetic future for now. Most black females still don’t get it. Once the manimals get what they need from you….YOU’RE DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!
Just FYI, black “females!”
But Mr. Race Rules’ theories about white manimals and black womb-men aren’t even the weirdest part of his, er, review of Bird Box. No, that honor has to go to his discussion of “falcon Heru the Hero.” Who, you ask? Let’s let him, er, explain:
The movie had a few interpretations as far as I could see with my 3rd eye partially open. One is the blind fold was blinding the pineal gland showing how everyone is really unconscious these days from all the poison and brainwashing. Second the bird box (B+B=2+2=22+Master Builder) showed how the falcon Heru the Hero is actually being held in a box or this Matrix and keeping his 3rd eye (really 1st eye) from awakening by the parasitic elite and their minions using light-bending technology to prevent the light code frequencies from returning through our ancestors.
Okey dokey then.
For a little context: Heru is another name for the falcon-headed Egyptian god Horus, and is apparently a major part of the esoteric conspiracy theories that Mr. Race Rules and a number of other similar theorists espouse. But I haven’t looked into the details of this yet, because my poor brain has already been taxed enough for one day, and I suspect that now yours has been as well.
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Rhuu I’m not trying to attack you but this time the only comment i am totally confused by is yours. Can you please explain how my mother personally not wanting an abortion for her personal body is politically pro-choice but personally forced birth? How is it forcing anything if it’s your own personal belief? Does your body your choice only apply if you want an abortion? She has never would never try to force me or anyone else to have an abortion and I have no idea where you got that from.
She helped me try to get my tubes tied when I was 25 and I wish I had a really bad downward spiral and became a heroin addict after my father died. They still wouldn’t let me.(It says something about how rampant misogyny is in this culture that they would not let a 25 year old woman without children get her tubes tied even though I was an IV heroin addict and black. I wasn’t aware enough back then but nowadays I would have thought those two things might possibly have tipped it over) What besides deceiving me about what pregnancy entailed did she actually do that is morally wrong?
I don’t see how someone can compare people like my mom to a forced birther. She’s been a teacher all her life and in some cases recommended abortion to 13 and 14 year olds because then having a baby is not pro-life it would not be good for the life that is already a sentient person. A fetus is a potential life not the life itself. Obviously it’s much more important to keep the 14 year old girls life on the track she desires because she is already here and living and thriving.
That’s part of what my mom thinks being pro-life means She’s not one of those people who runs around talking about how horrendous abortion is harassing people. I honestly can’t think of a time she’s brought it up with strangers. Only when she was with close friends who already knew her views.
After the conversation I had with her after all the responses I got here when I felt deceived and misled by her and was resentful about it she actually did agreed to consider maybe abortion is not a sin or if it is, it’s only in the sense that killing literally anything like insects is a sin because Thou shalt not kill.
And at this point she has agreed with that conclusion. God did say that thou shalt not kill, but I think some killings are worse than others. And in the end she agreed. Something that can’t live outside of its host is not it’s own being. That sounds clumsy I don’t really know how to phrase it but I think people will get what I mean.
Anyway this went on much longer than I meant it to like always but I truly think comparing my mom to a forced birther is a little harsh and unfair. Please don’t take this as an insult or attack but she literally has never tried to force any of her view on it me or anyone I know or have heard of so that seems completely factually incorrect to me I’m not trying to make an opinion it’s just who is she forcing to do what?
I was going off of what you said in the other thread, again and again, about her being personally pro-life but politically pro-choice. You can not want an abortion personally, but that isn’t being ‘pro-life’, that is not wanting an abortion personally.
How i understood your use of the phrase was that she personally believed that it was wrong and a sin, and would tell people closest to her (you, her friends) her beliefs. Not that she wouldn’t get an abortion, but that they were wrong and sinful.
I should have checked with you if that was still the case.
If your mom is still saying it is a sin, that carries a lot of weight with believers. So… That’s what i meant.
Plus the fact that we are having this discussion means that her ‘it’s a sin’ wormed its way into your brain. That’s fine, we are just in that culture, we all have some thinking and digging to do. But if she had never presented it as ‘personally, i think it’s a sin’, how would this and the past conversation have gone?
You also don’t have to worry that i think you are attacking me. You are asking for clarification of something i have said, which is how these conversations work. 🙂 If you were telling me that i am a smelly smelly face, that would be an attack. Asking for clarification is just conversation!
Re: why didn’t people tell the pro-life people to shove it – the Catholic church is powerful. And after roe v. Wade, the evangelicals hopped in the pro-life train as well. Why do we call ‘kleenex’ kleenex and not tissue paper? Why do some people call all pop ‘a coke’? Because powerful companies have marketed that term to mean something, and it gets applied. Fighting against advertising is hard.
That’s why people use the term ‘forced birth’. We’ll see how that catches on, but i know there are literal conferences about how abortion is evil. It’s a hard fight.
It’s because a lot of people in society DON’T see the forced-birther stance as something horrendous. A lot of people are more than happy to strip away reproductive rights from people with uteruses. A lot of people have a vested interest in giving that movement a nice, gentle sounding name so that people on the fence or ignorant people don’t think about the bad implications of it.
A lot of people have already removed reproductive rights from women, by shutting down abortion clinics and by implementing wait times and mandatory ultrasounds and other hurdles that it is impossible for many desperate women to get over. A lot of people have already removed reproductive rights from women by shaming and berating them so that they are too afraid to get a medical procedure that they need, or by straight up lying to them about the facts. This isn’t just about making abortion illegal.
And this isn’t just some academic argument over semantics. This is a fight against basic human rights that has been taking place for 45 years and has claimed the lives of countless women in that time. This is a fight that is looking increasingly perilous for women in the US, and in many other places.
Pro-lifers, which is what they call themselves and what everyone knows them as, are the ones who have done this.
This isn’t about how your mom feels about what pro-life should mean.
We’re not the ones comparing her to forced-brothers. She is comparing herself to forced birthers, by choosing to go by the same name as them.
We don’t know your mother. We don’t know what she has done in her life. We can only know what you tell us, and the first thing you tell us is that she’s pro-life.
If someone tells me that their mom is a Nazi, but, like, she’s a totally good person, really, I’m not going to go “hey, what sort of lovely things has she done? Does she just identify as a Nazi because she likes socialism and for some reasons doesn’t understand that “national socialist” means something completely different than the root words do?”.
No, I’m going to go “what the fuck, a Nazi? The bastards who are trying to rip rights away from people and kill them? Why the hell are you defending a Nazi?”
Same thing for the people who choose to identify as pro-life. If your mom wants to go by a label that aligns herself with awful people and has been widely known to be be used by awful people who have been attacking human rights for the last 45 years, then that’s her choice. But she shouldn’t be surprised about how people interpret that label.
I’m pretty sure that “thou shalt not kill” is only intended to apply to human beings, considering that in the Old Testament, the specified way to atone for quite a few sins and other general uncleaniness is to sacrifice livestock to God. The Old Testament would make even less sense if it read as “doing some sins? That’s all right. Just do some more sins, and it’s all good.”
But, hey, okay. Whatever. Does your mom think that antibiotics are a sin too?
Bread must be a sin, too. First you encourage a yeast culture to grow and thrive, then you bake it alive.
Eh, this thread is a few days old so this debate is probably dead, but a question:
For the insistence that “pro-life” really equals “anti-abortion” and nothing but “anti-abortion” and that “pro-life” is basically just a PR masquerade trying to make it appear as something it’s not: okay, sure. This is borderline axiomatic.
But what then is “pro-choice” but the same thing from the opposite side? Sure, it’s technically about allowing women the personal choice to have an abortion and not celebrating abortions of themselves as something intrinsically wonderful. But given that most “pro-choice” people I encounter also interpret this to mean that abortion is a positive right and not just a negative right, how is this not in operation “pro-the actual performance of abortions.”
So to be pro-choice doesn’t just mean that you believe nobody else should be able to *prevent* a woman from getting an abortion. It usually means things like: getting rid of the Hyde amendment so that federal money is explicitly used to fund abortion access and the procedure itself, getting abortion procedures covered by insurance so that insurers are compelled to provide them (or employers indirectly through those insurers), providing counseling and active facilitation in schools and other places funded by the government to educate women about the possibility of abortion and helping them get one, etc.
To be fair, it does look like in the recent past that some parts of the “pro-choice” side are starting to shed their own semantic pretense with things like “Shout Your Abortion.”
Like if it really is about debating about abortion, who really cares about labeling the sides taking part in the debate (as if those two sides are completely representative of the range of opinion in such a debate anyway? Neither certainly captures my opinion on this particular topic.) I guess I can understand why activists part of some explicit movement or group might care about marketing this much, but Average Joe?
I guess I’m just one of those people who sort of eschews most labels, not because I don’t have strong opinions on things, but because too often debates like this devolve into what the labels mean or signifiers of what tribe a person is in (and therefore how obligated you are or aren’t to listen to anything they say).
Like, I’ve never had a meaningful conversation about actual issues facing women with someone when the conversation began and ended in trying to define precisely what “feminism” is and who is or isn’t one, as if that determination is a convenient proxy for determining the legitimacy of everything that might come out of someone’s mouth. And overwhelmingly as soon as the word “feminist” or “egalitarian” or whatever ever word comes up, the conversation gets dominated by the dissection of these words and nothing else.
The same thing happens with immigration when people obsess over words like chain migration/family reunification, illegal alien/undocumented immigrant, or an ongoing semantic battle which is trying to equate or ossify difference between economic migrant/refugee.
Or, say, estate tax/death tax, social justice/identity politics or 700 other such word soup combinations I could think up.
I get that the specific thing that sparked this debate is a woman who is actively accepting the label of “pro-life,” but I don’t think this undermines what I’m saying.
If part of the issue is that “pro-life” is manipulative and inaccurate as a label, that it is explicitly meant to obfuscate and repackage what it’s really about, to put lipstick on a pig, to mislead people and potentially draw people into it’s orbit, shouldn’t that mean *more* tolerance for people who were drawn into the orbit through this semantic strategy but who are not hardcore advocates of the underlying ideology? Like, surely there’s a spectrum, right? Some range of behavior between murdering people who work at abortion clinics and people who want to limit access to abortions in the 3rd trimester or who support the Hyde amendment or whatever? And if you once accept that such a spectrum exists and that it matters where somebody falls on it, what is the willful conflation of the poles of the spectrum with each other but a cousin of the manipulativeness in the label “pro-life” itself, adopted probably for strategic/PR reasons and not really for ones of conscience? Like it serves the interests of the “pro-life” people to bring as many non-ideologues into their orbit as possible to try to legitimate themselves. *But* it also serves the interests of the “pro-choice” people to conflate anything under the “pro-life” umbrella with the absolute nastiest stuff under it. (And vice versa. Hence, pro-lifers not shutting up about Kermit Gosnell).
My point, I guess, is that if all this verbal posturing is to try to force people to chose sides along a binary “you are with us or you are against us” switch, that’s just not going to happen.
Ah, a “Voice of Reason” troll. Do fuck off, dear.
Every single person in the “pro-life” spectrum is perfectly fine with women dying and with taking the decision away from the woman as to how her organs are used. They all hold abhorrent beliefs in this instance. Every single one of them.
I think people who support the Hyde amendment and restrict late term abortions are nasty though.
Late term abortions are rare and done for medical reasons. Women die because doctors by choice or by policy prioritize saving the fetus over saving the pregnant person. If you oppose late term abortions, you are declaring that a woman is an incubator rather than a person.
The Hyde amendment very much undermines the abortion rights of those who need it most. Medicaid patients who often don’t have the necessary funds to pay for an abortion out of pocket. If you don’t have a lot of money and your insurance doesn’t pay for a procedure, you’re likely going to forego that procedure. Again, this is a policy that can lead to fatalities as low income women are more likely to die in childbirth.
I’m just not seeing the upside to going easy on someone just because they aren’t going to bomb Planned Parenthood. In fact, I would argue that at least in the US (can’t comment on other countries) we’re losing because we’ve been too nice and accommodating. Ceded too much of the moral high ground to the forced birthers by calling abortion a necessary evil or saying we are not pro-abortion but pro-choice. The stronger, more forceful language coming from the pro-choice side in recent years is needed course correction.
So, odds on the response being “So much for the tolerant left,” or “you’re all mean and nasty,” or both?
… What? Yes, I am pro “the actual performance of abortions”. That is what pro-choice means?
Why do people keep thinking that pro-choice people are squeamish about even the word ‘abortion’? It is kind of the point of ‘pro-choice’?
As I said above, you can know that you wouldn’t have an abortion, and still be pro-choice, if you believe that you are choosing to not have one, and that other people (no matter what their actions were in the run up to the pregnancy) deserve the same choice.
Yes, thank you for illustrating that how we use language matters, and frames how people think about things. That is why we have words that signify what we believe (pro-choice), as well as words that obscure what people believe while still sounding good (pro-life).
I’m not actually sure what your point is?
“I’m just not seeing the upside to going easy on someone just because they aren’t going to bomb Planned Parenthood. In fact, I would argue that at least in the US (can’t comment on other countries) we’re losing because we’ve been too nice and accommodating. Ceded too much of the moral high ground to the forced birthers by calling abortion a necessary evil or saying we are not pro-abortion but pro-choice. The stronger, more forceful language coming from the pro-choice side in recent years is needed course correction.”
It’s certainly more honest, which is a good part of what I was saying.
“So, odds on the response being “So much for the tolerant left,” or “you’re all mean and nasty,” or both?”
Obvious bait is obvious.
5 sentences in and you already admit to bad faith. The very concept of applying a moral value to a medical procedure is an anti-abortion creation. Nobody is bombing hospitals because of miscarriages. Nobody is bombing liquor stores because daddy drank too much and caused birth complications. Nobody is bombing research centres because of the 83% of fertilised eggs that never survive.
Only in abortion does it matter. Only when it’s the woman to “blame”.
It’s also used to fund things like knee surgery which is “technically not necessary” if you’re a luddite. Or other ‘PC’ things like blood transfusion which I hear used to be quite the scandal.
“local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and other programs” Edsall, Thomas B. (2006-03-22). “Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues” Washington Post. pp. A01.
Let’s not forget that “abstinence education” is a legal license to make shit up out of thin air.
Piss off you pearl-clutching narcissist.
Women are not a debate, we are human beings. The very idea that there is a debate with two equal sides is a pretence.
*claims they don’t have strong opinions*
*is pearl-clutching that supporters of women’s autonomy might get funded, while anti-abortion groups are swimming in pools of cash*
I call bullshit
Ah yes, people should be able to use any words they like without being called out for using those words.
Earth to Lesley: words mean things.
Hmm, I wonder why. I wonder. I wonder if we’d be able to tell if we were shown these conversations. I wonder if it involved bad faith and/or topic derailing.
I wonnnnder.
Why is it that you can’t go 5 minutes with a “concerned centrist” before they pull out the racism dog whistle.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
https://thatsnothowlifeworks.org
Psst. You’re not supposed to give away your tactics.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this, uh, I’m gonna say argument. So is the argument is that both sides are just biased against one another, and both sides have problems? I mean, here’s the crux of it:
Turns out that you can’t organize a social movement without labels. Humans aren’t telepathic and we need to use, you know, words to communicate. It’s messy and detail is lost, but you can’t organize an effective movement by fussing over endless detail. So you end up with sides, and nuanced discussion happens on the sidelines.
If you’ve never been involved in those nuanced discussions, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist – it just means that you aren’t there for any that happen.
The term was picked up specifically because the anti-abortion crowd started using “pro-life”, with the obvious insinuation that their opponents were anti-life. So people who had a horse in the race came up with their own term, pro-choice, so that they wouldn’t get stuck being the anti-life crowd. The actual positions and arguments behind them haven’t changed, and there’s still wiggle room inside the terms, especially in the pro-choice circles.
Using the term has nothing to do with forcing someone to join a side – and the fact that you see these terms as little more than flag-waving is demonstrative. I’d like to gently suggest that you’re a little too eager to stand on the outside and call both sides problematic, and that that’s coloured your perceptions. That’s at least how it feels from my own blinkered perspective.
Toodle!
EDIT: You are a good egg, Jane Done.
“Yes, thank you for illustrating that how we use language matters, and frames how people think about things. That is why we have words that signify what we believe (pro-choice), as well as words that obscure what people believe while still sounding good (pro-life).”
My point is that “pro-choice” *is* an obscuration of what that word actually means, which is “pro-positive right to abortions.” Yea, people who are “pro-choice” probably extend the underlying philosophy of bodily autonomy into other things – like consent during sex or being able to get a sex change operation, but those things *aren’t* what they are talking about when they say they are “pro-choice.”
Both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are trying to substitute statements about an underlying philosophical position that informs *why* they have an opinion on a particular policy for their actual opinion on the policy itself.
Probably because philosophical/moral ideals separated from context are easy to get people to agree with.
Hardly anybody is going to disagree with either
“I believe people should have control over their own bodies.” OR
“I believe human lives should be afforded dignity and a right to flourish.”
Until you start qualifying them with actual context.
“*claims they don’t have strong opinions*”
Um, I literally claimed the opposite of this. I said I eschew labels but it wasn’t because I don’t have strong opinions.
Meaning that I don’t believe that some milquetoast half way in the middle answer is the correct answer to everything.
Every dog in a 10-block radius can hear you, I think you can stop now.
“Using the term has nothing to do with forcing someone to join a side – and the fact that you see these terms as little more than flag-waving is demonstrative. I’d like to gently suggest that you’re a little too eager to stand on the outside and call both sides problematic, and that that’s coloured your perceptions. That’s at least how it feels from my own blinkered perspective.”
I don’t see them as universally flag-waving. They are definitely used that way on this forum more often than not.
@ Lesley
But surely, unless you have a positive right to exercise an option, then ‘choice’ is meaningless?
Without a positive right to abortion then choice is basically “any colour you want, so long as it’s black”.
??? Pro-Choice also isn’t about what colour to paint your room, if you’re going to go to university, or what flavour of ice cream you’re going to get.
It’s about abortion, and access to abortion.
The term ‘pro-choice’ means ‘pro-access to abortion’. Are you arguing that it should include other things? Because those other things you mentioned usually fall under the ‘feminist’ umbrella.
Also, please not that ‘sex change operation’ is a pretty outdated term.
From this GLAAD resource.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean here, and I feel that this is the crux of your argument.
“Every dog in a 10-block radius can hear you, I think you can stop now.”
So those things *aren’t* meaningful specific examples of the sanctity of bodily autonomy?
Oh my God @Lesley
You’re seriously complaining that the labels aren’t descriptive enough? That they’re deceptive or otherwise used as cynical tools for some purpose?
Pro-choice people do support the right of a woman to choose –and for her preference to be available to her. Pro-choice is a perfectly descriptive term. It’s just got implicit information.
And – guess what – every term has implicit information. That’s how words work.
I’m gonna gently suggest again that your problem with this isn’t the terms.
Obvious troll is obvious – or just unhappy that your talking points were anticipated? And you do realize that this semantic argument was started by a “pro-life” apologist who came in here specifically to pick this fight?
That is a fair point, I misread.
Ummm…cool?
Did you not just spend an entire 225-word paragraph arguing in favour for a half way in the middle answer?
The answer to the one and only topic we’re discussing?
I mean I guess you could believe there’s only a right and wrong way to butter your toast. That would count as not believing in a middle ground to everything. I too have strong feelings about toast.
“But surely, unless you have a positive right to exercise an option, then ‘choice’ is meaningless?
Without a positive right to abortion then choice is basically “any colour you want, so long as it’s black”.”
It would certainly become “so long as it’s black” for some people depending on how constraining regulations about abortion actually were.
But that’s how any “negative right” works and it’s not an intrinsically nonsensical position to hold on abortion (though you can argue it’s an immoral one). It’s basically the position most libertarians have on it. So you can have a negative right to free speech, say, but it doesn’t mean anybody will actually listen to you talk or otherwise give you the time of day.