By David Futrelle
I guess I owe an apology to Reddit’s contingent of Men Going Their Own Way. In the past I have suggested that MGTOWs spend all day every day talking shit about the women they’ve supposedly declared their complete independence from.
Turns out this isn’t completely accurate. Sometimes they (and/or the white supremacists who are trying to recruit in MGTOW spacees) also talk shit about Teh Jews, blaming them for (among other things) putting too many ladies into superhero movies. Oh, sorry, not Teh Jews — the (not so) mysterious “(((They))).”
In a post on the MGTOW subreddit yesterday, a Redditor called WW2Pics suggested that the casting of a “5 ft 3 Jewish Woman” — Natalie Portman — as Thor in the upcoming movie Thor: Love and Thunder was a sign that “they” are “going for the Jugular” in the culture wars.
He found a lot of support for this theory.
“Can the agenda get anymore obvious?” agreed someone called unkn0wnbyte.
A black woman is the new James Bond, Thor is going to be played by a Jewish woman, and the first LGBTQ superhero will make its debut
Someone calling himself heightdiscrimination explained further:
The agenda is social engineering and I think that they believe that if they push it long enough and hard enough, that eventually they will win out and awakened people will just back down out of fatigue, demoralization and fear of being labelled.
And the evil (((they))) don’t even care if they lose money in the process by alienating whiny white fanboys.
“[T]he agenda must be pushed at all costs is my guess,” WW2Pics declared.
It’s like porn, they’re losing massive amounts of money by making high quality HD content free on sites like Pornhub so why do they do it??
Another commenter, who is definitely not a sockpuppet of one of the previous commenters, asserted that
It’s all about the agenda and social engineering. They can print up all the money in the world so P&L isn’t really a concern for them.
TIL that the Federal Reserve regularly prints up bales of money that they deliver directly to porn and movie producers.
If anyone had missed the point of all this dogwhistling, yet another commenter suggested that Hollywood was white male genociding him.
Fuck Marvel for fucking up my heritage. Even before they made him into a woman, they made the fucking god of thunder, look like some whiney little bitch. Fucking shitty franchise.
Not content with attacking (((them))) for fucking with Norse mythology,, GemStarCN21 managed to work a famous Greek mythological figure (and her vagina) into the mix.
The song of the ages i.e. the cycle of civilizations has to run it’s course in my view. We’ve allowed Pandora to spread her legs and open her box to everyone, there’s no coming(phrasing) back from that.
So Pandora’s “box” is her vagina? That seems a rather, er, reductive reading of the myth. Also, in the original mythology, her box not only wasn’t her vagina; but it also wasn’t even a box. (It was a jar.) Can’t believe anyone would tamper with myth like this GenSTar dude.
Women wield too much power today; they are holding on to it, want it all and also want everything else; as we see with Thor.
It will only get worse until something big, unexpected and earth shattering happens, then we’ll have a reset.
Well, to be fair, we do seem to be well on our way to a civilization-challenging if not civilization-destroying climate catastrophe. But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t have much to do with women having too much power — or with Natalie Portman being cast as a comic-book version of Thor.
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The OP is correct that Hollywood’s agenda could not be more obvious: they are desperately trying to suck every dollar out of popular franchises by churning out endless sequels, as they are not capable of venturing onto new ground. Casting more diverse (“unusual”) characters is a way to try to freshen up the old vehicles so that people might care enough to pay to see them.
There is no community whose agenda is so invariable: money, money, money. It always makes me laugh to see anyone imagine that Hollywood ever has any other motive.
Re: 007
I’m mostly curious whether she’s going to be a psychopath or not, as the best Bonds are.
Re: Jews killing the dinosaurs
I’m sure it was the Jewish dinosaurs’ fault. Probably they saw the asteroid coming and didn’t tell anyone because it was the Sabbath or something.
Re
I’ll agree with your parenthesis, but can you guarantee this wouldn’t lead to Netanyahu become Supreme World Leader?
Re: Bobbitt jokes
Yeah, I agree with @Skye, let’s not. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/arts/television/lorena-bobbitt-documentary-jordan-peele.html for those who want to know what’s wrong with them.
Re: Boris Johnson
Actually, I think those two words say it all. I imagine the Queen is wincing right now. On the other hand, she’s also probably preparing some charmingly cutting remarks to make sure he realises that she knew Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was a friend of hers. And he, sir, is no Winston Churchill.
At least she’s had 70 years with Philip to get used to dealing with his type… I’d be very curious to know if she’s going to suggest he has to prove, quickly, that he has the confidence of the House.
ETA
Re: Hollywood
It still says a lot for their lack of imagination that the best response they can think of to Netflix’s original programming is “Oh yeah? Well, we’ve got all these copyrighted characters you can’t use! And our explosions look way better on the big screen, so there!”
As an aside, here is the next movie from the director of Thor 4:
https://youtu.be/eDOEIUbaT-U
To be precise, it was a pyx.
@Garnetstar:
And the fact that the Chinese market now makes Hollywood more money than the American market makes increasing diversity (at least some segments of it) pretty much inevitable. See also ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.
@Rabid Rabbit:
Of course, one of the problems with Netflix is that now that everybody is doing their own streaming services and exclusive licensing agreements, we’re back to the bad old days of having to pay regular payments to a number of separate ‘walled garden’ companies in order to see multiple things.
re: Hobbit joke:
Apologies, that was wrong of me
re: Hobbit joke:
fuck you, autocorrect….
@moregeekthan
I think this is the best quote I’ve read today!
I was looking to mock the unjustified, paranoid, misogynistic imaginings of the Redditors in the OP.
I didn’t have to use Lorena Bobbitt’s experience to do that. I apologize and will refrain in the future.
The weird thing about the Bobbitt story was the automatic pun between “Bobbitt” and “Bob it”.
I think it became a huge story in part because every man knows in his heart how easy it would be for a woman to take that sort of revenge for bad treatment. It’s a testimony to women’s fundamental decency that it very seldom happens.
The problems in the UK are directly traceable to the same source as ours in the USA: Rupert Murdoch. The UK problems largely started with budget deficits caused by the economic meltdown in the US. The Tories, greatly helped by the press, represented the deficits as Labour irresponsibility rather than bad luck that caused an otherwise responsible budget to go deeply into the red. The right-wing press, led by Murdoch — all of whom favored reining in the social safety net — got the Tories elected and represented their austerity program as a necessity (it actually made the recession worse). Then the press supported a vote on Brexit which made absolutely incredible promises which no PM could ever bring to fruition. And now we have Boris Johnson, who may give the UK a no-deal Brexit which will lead to a full circle in history — the UK would become in effect an economic colony of the US, a more remote version of Puerto Rico.
@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina
There’s a nice word, monocausotaxophilia, meaning “love of a single cause that explains everything”.
The Telegraph and the Daily Mail have also worked very hard to build the current social and political climate in the UK, and neither are Murdoch properties. And that’s just looking at newspapers, and only ones I’ve heard of, too.
It also slightly presupposes that everyone would be nice and reasonable in the absense of Rupert and friends, which a) somewhat removes the agency of assholes, who should be held responsible for their own assholery regardless of who encouraged it, and b) is a bizarrely optimistic view of human nature.
Already has, actually – Dreamer, from the CW show Supergirl.
@Violet –
Back during the twitter responses to the first Democratic debate I remember someone making a joke about Tim Ryan – they posted his picture and said something like “this is what you’d get if you told me to draw a picture of Bill DeBlasio”. I saw some still image from Johnson’s victory celebration and I thought the same thing about him and Trump. At least you can tell them apart by the hands.
Just to expand a bit on what Garnetstar said, there’s a reason that they have to find a shadowy outside force at play whenever they begin to critique capitalism. Every single person living in a developed country has been taught that the markets are the great equalizer and capitalism is what delivers all of our prosperity and increasingly the best cultural touchstones, which before globalization and the internet were mostly power fantasies for white dudes (see: the entire 1980s). But rather than accepting that those same market forces that delivered them all their favourite Stallone films 30 years ago are now delivering similar commercialized cultural artifacts aimed at a broader swath of people with the aid of the internet, they have to invent some boogeyman for whom that upbringing is completely foreign, a boogeyman that has their own sinister agenda and is putting their thumb on the cultural scales for [insert minority group here] due to their own “””globalist””” ideology. The Jews are a convenient scapegoat because not only has the groundwork for anti-Semitism been laid for centuries, but part of that groundwork is a (nonsensical, but internally consistent) explanation for their motivation, which is that their religious and “”””””””ethnic””””””” ingroups are stronger than their national ingroups. Hence in their minds, American Jews are Jews first and foremost and Americans second or not at all, as they didn’t eat apple pie and burn out their frontal lobes watching Invasion USA on repeat (doubly ironic because Cannon Films, the maker of so many schlock action movies like Invasion USA, was run by two Israeli-Americans named Golan and Globus).
TL;DR — Guys, there’s no conspiracy. It’s just capitalism being capitalism.
@Katamount:
There’s more. Right-wingers believe these things because right-wingers themselves think that way. There’s very few of these Republican troglodytes who wouldn’t throw America under the bus if they were forced to choose one of “Republicans” or “America” over the other. Proof: nearly all of them did, by continuing to support Trump even as it became clearer and clearer that he is a Russian stooge, with only a few notable exceptions like Amash.
So of course they expect American Jews to choose their religion/ethnicity over America in case of any conflict between them, and they expect Omar to side with Muslim causes over America, and so forth. Because it’s what they would do. What they have done and are doing. Their own religion/ethnicity (white Evangelical, and increasingly they seem to view “Republican” itself as a religious identity) takes precedence over national loyalty, and they think it is that way for everyone.
Of course they also have a psychological defense mechanism against perceiving themselves as hypocrites, which is to conflate the nation with their own religion/ethnicity. So they see America as a white Evangelical thing, and everyone else as impurities and deviants. This defense mechanism is the root of nationalism and, ultimately, of Nazism in turn.
As austerity is designed to do.