No one is standing up for Velma, the show that 4Channers and progressives alike love to hate

The first cartoon in history to have no audience, and somehow manages to unify everyone in their hatred of it. Congrats to the show creators for this astounding feat.

It’s sad, because I think a different-race take on Velma could have been cool. They just gave her an absolutely unlikeable personality that seems so weird and inconsistent with the character’s history. I mean, she’s supposed to be smart and honest, and that can come off as offensive at times just by itself, but she also cared about the others and I can’t see her cracking a #metoo “joke”. IIRC (though it’s been quite a while since I last read it) Velma was pretty prickly in that zombie-apocalypse Scooby Doo comic too, and comes off as sus and unlikeable at first, but she definitely had redeeming traits and you got to warm up to her and develop sympathy for her as you learn about her past, and it’s understandable why in that storyline she keeps herself emotionally disconnected most of the time.

It’s written by a TERF so another reason I have no desire to watch it.

I think for a deconstructive parody of Scooby-Doo it’s hard to beat the Groovy Gang from The Venture Brothers. Funny (if cruel) and it didn’t run the joke into the ground.

@Seth S

To progressive folk, satire of “woke” is perfectly fine. What gets us to express ire is when malicious reactionary propaganda tries to disguise itself as “satire.” Especially when it’s not at all satirical, but angry, bitter, and inherently unfunny to everyone who isn’t an outrage addicted reactionart. When the reactionaries hate it too? It has failed on every level.

Just what you’d expect from a pseudo feminist, transphobic mealy mouthed right-winger who tries to play the center.

Urgh. That first tweet from @MarkACollett. He is an absolutely vile piece of trash. When I first became aware of him he was head of publicity for the BNP (British National Party: a UK far-right “political party” that has since largely disintegrated). You can see the sort of guy he is from his rationalwiki page https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mark_Collett – there’s a picture of him at the top of the article with his (?then) girlfriend; she’s proudly showing off the huge swastika tattoo on her chest.

If you’re reading this Mark, I’m the guy who called you a coward to your face and you did absolutely nothing. Coward.

@David Futrelle:

The type-specimen of Black Propaganda is probably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (and a number of commenters have pointed out that the Nazis proceeded to adopt the subversive tactics ascribed to the Grand Unified Jewish Megaconspiracy as their own playbook.)

@Redsilkphoenix:

Amongst other things, I heard the black girl the future Shaggy gets involved with to get over his crush on Velma is named…Scoobi.

Which would be right up there with Nagini turning out to be a cursed weresnake Indian woman.

@LollyPop:

I feel this with Rings of Power. God I wanted to love that show SO MUCH. Engaging with the online discourse on the subject is exhausting – from those who think not liking it in any capacity is a racist dog-whistle to the guys who sincerely argued with me that the aim (of AMAZON, no less) was not to make money but deliberately undermine Real Tolkein Fans through the scourge of diverse casting choices, with Bezos himself at the edge of this strange and studied attack.

What they’re undermining are the careers of the actors who have this perfunctory and dismally unenjoyable material to work with—and who can then be thrown under the bus if the show meets with a negative reaction: “See? We tried, but…”

And Rings of Power was a brazen cash grab, all right—whose underlying reasoning seems to have been, “Let’s take Middle-Earth (already an established multigenerational cash cow) and make it more like Game of Thrones!” (And never mind that contempt on the part of the showrunners managed to tank that show.)

I have no strong feelings about ScoobyDoo, to be honest, because I never watched any version. I can only comment that I never saw a funny Me Too joke in my life, but that wasn’t even a joke. That was just someone outright saying Me Too muzzled comedians… and I would argue if that was the case, maybe the comedians were only funny to gross men, and the comedians started reading the room.

@call me mark

If you’re reading this Mark, I’m the guy who called you a coward to your face and you did absolutely nothing. Coward.

Uh, I mean… what should he have done? Escalated? Displayed toxic aggression and hit you? Corruptly abused his power to undermine your status for daring to insult him? Or just insulted you back?

I doubt it’s purposely **bad**.

But it’s probably purposefully ideological. And a conservative of color is just the kind of person to race-change establish characters while savaging everything of substance that I might value.

It sounds like it turned out exactly as we should have expected.

From what I’ve read, it’s just badly-written. You could make all the characters white and straight, and it still would be mean-spirited and unfunny.

If all the characters were white, then the righties would probably love it!

The first Twat there is so racist he thinks everyone non-white is Black. Um?

However, like most sensible people, I maintain that Velma was always lesbian; those of us Of A Certain Age thought so, and I knew of kids who weren’t allowed to watch because their parents thought Velma liked the ladies (and also Shaggy clearly being a stoner).

However, like most sensible people, I maintain that Velma was always lesbian

Yeah. I don’t know anyone who watched the original and thought she was straight. I guess they gave her a beard every few episodes to prevent her sexual preference from being too obvious. But come on.

Neither did I. That likely has something to do with the fact that I had a single-digit age at the time.

@Amtep:

I think this is relevant to “We hunted the mammoth”:

https://www.boredpanda.com/ancient-female-hunters-gender-roles/

Turns out we all hunted the mammoth.

See this? This is my shocked face.

No, really!

First women Viking warriors, now huntresses. How long until they realize that a goodly portion of buried Mesoamerican/Pacific-islander/etc. “kings” were, in fact, queens, do you think?

Misogyny is not the natural order of things. People aren’t born misogynists any more than they are born racist — children have to learn both of those from the bad examples set by the people around them. Infants are equal-opportunity assholes, as a rule.

Which, in turn, means misogyny was invented in some particular time and place and spread out from there. I suspect that the place was within the borders of the former Soviet Union and the time was somewhere between 9 and 6 thousand years ago, among nomadic tribal animal herders.

Fishers, hunter-gatherers, village-scale horticulturalists, and suchlike, even Alpine goat and sheep herders, have lifestyles and political structures that don’t scale. When they hit the carrying capacity of their land they cease growing in numbers or send off a group to settle a distance away (if there’s unoccupied land nearby to go to). They come up with contraceptives or abortifacients of some sort — sheepskin condoms, various pharmaceutically-active herbs — or resort to equal-opportunity infanticides to constrain their numbers. But cattle herders who’ve domesticated the horse and live in the vast Asian steppe? They can grow their numbers almost indefinitely.

Now consider warfare. Most warfare is, in fact, one society organizing a heist of some portion of another society’s productive capital. Feudal kingdoms warred for territory, when arable land was the primary productive capital. Societies with labor shortages raided for slaves. Early industrial nation-states warred for territory out of habit, but ended up with surplus land and bombed-out factories for their troubles; late industrial nation-states war for oil, or to funnel money to defense contractors (so the actual contest for capital is between competing industrialists, often within the same nation-state), or they use privateer-like methods to steal money (e.g. Russia’s army of ransomware mafioso who are near-explicitly allowed to operate as long as they code their ransomware to self-destruct if it infects a Russian machine. Steal from other nation-states, but steal from your own and they’ll revoke your letter of marque). The late Paleolithic/early Neolithic settled societies would have warred mainly for land or fisheries, and only on a small scale, and because of their carrying-capacity woes, growing their numbers would not have given them an advantage. Malnourished soldiers are poor fighters, as a general rule.

The steppes afforded a different situation. First, war outcomes would have almost solely been decided by the numbers: flat open terrain makes terrain advantages moot and surprise generally unavailable. Tech differences would not last very long at all before being copied or stolen. Second, the steppe environment allowed growing those numbers nearly without limit. Your mobile polity could grow exponentially, including your capital (which is cattle and horses) as well as your population. When the time came to steal someone else’s cattle and horses, or else have yours stolen, the advantage was firmly to the side with the greater numbers. And in the long run, the long-term advantage was to the polity with the fastest growth exponent. The bottleneck was … human women. Cattle and horses both have a doubling time of perhaps a year or two, given abundant grazing land, whereas humans double rather more slowly, perhaps every 20 to 30 years, if women are given personal autonomy. Take that away and make them into baby factories though and you can shorten that doubling time to perhaps 15 years. So, on the vast steppe the advantage went to the group most willing to treat its women as another form of productive capital rather than people.

These are the people who invented brides and marriage. The very fact that the word “husband” is used both for a male spouse and in the phrase “animal husbandry” speaks fucking volumes. These are also almost surely the people who invented slavery, authoritarian hierarchy in general, and the concept of property ownership beyond one’s own personal effects. (Early agriculturalists in the Indus, Tigris, Euphrates, Nile etc. valleys were probably something close to what we’d now call communist.) Part of this is the owning-other-living-beings thing which automatically creates some hierarchy; part was that consensus-building scales poorly and the steppe hordes quickly outstripped that scale, and the simplest solution is to replace a flat society with a hierarchy of leadership so that quadratic coordination problems become merely n log n. (Every computer scientist or programmer worth their salt surely is familiar with eventually replacing a linear structure with an nary tree to get around certain scaling problems. This is the same thing, except with people.)

So, not just misogyny: almost the entirety of what some have called the kyriarchy, and in particular the seeds of patriarchy, slavery, and even capitalism, can likely be traced back to the Neolithic predecessors of the Mongol hordes.

As for how it spread beyond them, well, whenever the hordes came up against settled populations at the steppe borders, their numerical advantage and the advantage their cavalry had over everyone else’s infantry made it a cheap and easy score to raid the settlers for food and other things. Even cheaper and easier would have been to turn this into a protection racket: give us a periodic tribute without resistance, and some of us will stick around and defend you from all the other horde groups wandering the steppes. The gangster-herders who stuck around transitioned to a settled way of life and eventually set themselves up as a local ruling class identified by distinct paternal bloodlines, and began osmotically spreading their hierarchical and patriarchal values to the settlers. The resulting hybrid society had a ruling group at the top, defined as those with a specific patrilineal bloodline; capital-ownership exclusive to the men of said bloodline (and now adding arable land to cattle and women as owned capital); a hybrid military with officers/cavalry from the ruler-bloodline and infantry drawn from among the peasantry … sound familiar? Sounds an awful lot like a feudal kingdom to me. So feudalism is also their fault!

This would have taken place along a giant arc stretching from present-day eastern Europe around Poland/Hungary/Austria or so, south into the Middle East and the rising urban/agricultural societies there, east through India to southeast Asia, and north into China. Some of these societies resisted and banded together for mutual defense; they created the first large nation-states. But they also absorbed hierarchy, misogyny, and proto-capitalism. Most probably became feudal societies from their first contacts with the raiders, and then underwent imperiogenesis to defend against later waves of steppe-horde raiders. By then the steppe hordes proper would have been going into Malthusian boom-bust cycles because the steppe itself, though huge, is finite. That cycle only finally ended a few hundred years ago, when the Genghis Khan broke against the defenses of easternmost western Europe. The next bust cycle set in and furnished the opportunity for settler societies to move in, carve the steppe up into nation-states and owned parcels of land, and turn it eventually into what became the Russian Empire.

If the above hypothesis as to how history actually unfolded in Eurasia is correct, then misogyny would have been virtually unknown elsewhere until the era of European colonialism. The likeliest exceptions are the American southwest and the African savanna, which afforded the next-largest two expanses of steppe environments. These may have created misogynistic and hierarchical societies within and immediately around themselves. Islanders (including early British Islanders!), South America, and the deepest jungle tribes should have been untouched in pre-Columbian, and in some cases into early modern, times.

Female Viking warriors then come as no surprise at all: they were raiders, to be sure, but not horse-mounted steppe nomads, and the factors involving numerical advantages and full-nomadism would not have applied to the Vikings. They were likely gender-egalitarian, or close to it, right up until Christianity came knocking on their door with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.

There are some other sordid things one notices about history. For example, when the conquistadoers did erupt onto the world stage, some places remained populated primarily with brown people (though now yoked to Europeans and later Americans by unequal economic relations) while in others the brown people were largely extirpated in colossal acts of genocide. What made the difference? The places with large-scale genocides and replacement by white people took place are: North America north of Mexico; a small chunk of South America around Argentina and Chile; Australia and to a lesser degree New Zealand and Hawaii; South Africa, which didn’t get a near-complete extermination but did get apartheid and a large white settler population; and the former Soviet Union, where the (then converted to Islam) Mongol hordes were replaced by white Slavs from central Europe. Where was spared full-on genocide? Southeast Asia; India; east Asia east of the Soviet Union’s eastern border, so China and Japan; Africa north of South Africa; South America north of Argentina; and an assortment of little tropical islands.

Leaving aside China and Japan, everywhere spared the real White Replacement seems to be tropical. China and Japan had civilizations advanced enough to defend themselves against large-scale invasion and wars of extermination, but still got the shitty-lopsided-trade-relations part like e.g. sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East did. Everywhere else at temperate latitudes, the natives largely got wiped out and the native cultures largely obliterated rather than “merely” being forced to pay lip service to some version or another of either Christianity or Islam. (China and Japan avoided even forced religious conversion, meanwhile, because they could fight back effectively.)

The pattern is that wherever Europeans could transplant their crops, and thus their farming methods and particular way of life, that’s where they all but wiped out the natives where these were not technologically advanced enough to resist. Everywhere else got Colonialism Lite, with religious conversion and lopsided trade and brutal local puppet governors and slave raiding but no wholesale extermination campaign and replacement by white settlers.

All of this stuff is also reflected in the religious beliefs of various cultures. The horticulturalists, fishers, hunter-gatherers, and such all tended to have animism in various forms, positing spirits behind most natural forces and associated with particular regions of the land they knew, and typically imposing little or no hierarchy on these spirits, beyond that each is generally stronger than any of the others when the matter at issue is squarely in that spirit’s bailiwick. So the sea god must defer to the wind god in matters of wind, and vice versa in matters of large open bodies of water, etc.

The gods and spirits of such peoples very often are human-animal chimeras, when they’re not simply a non-human animal with superpowers or disembodied altogether. Notably, early agricultural civilizations are included in this — take a look at the pantheons of Egypt and India, particularly.

When they got hierarchy and capital (and usually misogyny, slavery, and the like) they often threw out the old pantheon and adopted a new one of wholly humanoid gods whose interpersonal dynamics bore a remarkable resemblance to those of a royal family with its court intrigues and its shared interest in keeping the commoners in their place. The Greek and Roman pantheons are of this type, and the Greek myths preserve even the transition, in the form of the Titanomachy. For what are the often-chimerical-to-downright-beastly Titans, but the same sort of chimerical gods as are found in the Egyptian and Indian pantheons? The Vikings also preserved evidence of this transition: they have a bunch of nature gods, the Vanir, with antlers and things, and they also have a bunch of squabbling royal-house type gods, the Aesir, in their royal house of Valhalla. They didn’t go as far as the Greeks did, probably because Christianity interrupted them before the process could run all the way to completion, and turn the Ragnarok of their eschatology into a Titanomachy of the past that deposed the Vanir completely. Retcon interruptus.

Where do the big monotheisms fit into this? Interestingly, monotheisms may come from pure-herding societies. The clearest cut case is Islam, emerging from herder societies on the fringe of Arabia and the then Persian Empire (and apparently the model for the emerging religion/resistance in Frank Herbert’s Dune). Of course, they emerged from monotheistic Jews and Christians, not from pagans, so maybe that doesn’t count. But early Judaism wasn’t apparently monotheistic! That seems to have developed sometime around when they were wandering in the desert … i.e., nomads. Christianity grew out of later, monotheistic Judaism, and Zoroastrianism came from the same damn region at a bit earlier time, where the cultural zeitgeist must surely have contained chunks of Judaism and probably bits and pieces of Greek, Roman, and Indian mythology too. What did the actual Mongols believe, before converting to Islam? Apparently, that was a hybrid of animism and … monotheism, with Tengri as “the ruler of heaven and the god of the Eternal Blue Sky”. Big-Daddy Sky Gods appear to be a steppe nomad thing! They get adopted by settled cultures only when a fairly complex chain of events occurs: first, they get raided, protection-racketed, and eventually taken over by steppe nomads, and their nature gods get the Titanomachy treatment as they get pagan royal-family-in-the-sky religion; then, they form an empire on the scale of the Roman or Persian or Chinese to resist later waves of steppe nomad invaders from successive steppe boom-bust cycles when the latter nears peak population and hunger begins to bite; then, smaller nomad societies on their fringe amalgamate their big-open-sky god with the fragments of royal-gods mythology leaking out of said empire; and then a Paul Atreides or a Moses or a Mohammad or sommat leads said nomads into their own invasion of the empire at a time of imperial structural-demographic weakness, and are able to convert it (e.g. Persia to Islam, Rome to Christianity) either as part of a deal or by overt takeover by force. And that leads to a different sky god hybrid religion. Instead of Tengri plus animism you get Jehovah plus … Satan and all his demonic minions. The royal-house gods get turned into angels or other lesser demigod-level superbeings, with the nomads’ sky-god the only one considered a full god anymore, and the Titans, or Vanir, or whatever get literally demonized and sent to Hell. And that retcon, too, gets an in-universe storyline, some sort of Infinite Crisis in Heaven or Lucifer cast into a lake of fire sort of deal. This also means you have a former sky god living under the current one: really ancient Greeks worship the Titans, merely ancient greeks worship sky-god Tengri-derived Zeus up on Mount Olympus and his squabbling brethren and descendants; modern Greeks worship Greek Orthodox Jehovah (a third-hand knockoff of a knockoff of Tengri) and his demigod son Jesus, with Zeus (only a secondhand knockoff of Tengri!) demoted to mere archangel and renamed to Gabriel or sommat, messenger god Mercury demoted to the messenger angel Michael, and the horned god of the hunt relegated to ruling the underworld as the devil with Typhon and the Kraken and Medusa and all of them among his demonic hordes.

Not to be outdone, the Catholics of course go and load up the heavens with an additional pantheon of “saints”, somewhere above humans but below angels in the cosmic hierarchy. And of course, every layer of adding more hierarchy also adds more misogyny. Half the important Vanir and Titans are women. There are a bunch of important women under Zeus or Jupiter or Brahma or Odin, but they often get tricked and raped by Zeus or Loki or Hades or some such asshole, and the head honcho is indisputably a guy. And the male gods have an inordinate fondness for raping human women, sometimes by deception and sometimes just by force. The sky gods are also rapists, every single one of them, slipping into mortals’ bedrooms and impregnating them without so much as a how-do-you-do, and all of the important angels are male, not just the head honcho. There are way more named female demons than named female angels in these mythologies, as a rule, as well as proportionately more named female characters to named male characters on the satanic side of the never-ending war. Oh, did I mention that the animistic Vanir type gods tend to be mostly peaceful, the royal-squabblies have Hatfield-and-McCoy scale spats and often threaten a larger war (e.g. Ragnarok), and the sky daddy ones with their armies of minions are in a Bushite Forever War, usually in the Middle East? The sky daddy ones are also the only ones to explicitly keep slaves. Angels, djinni, etc. are expressly described in most monotheistic belief systems as lacking free will of their own, and yet there’s always that one angel who rebelled … as if the rest had it revoked because of this rebellion. Or are the obedient droid/clone army made to replace them, perhaps. Which means e.g. Mercury goes from a full-blooded god to the sky-god’s slave in this transition.

The big question mark is what happens to all of this with industrial civilization? Obviously there’s another big transition in the god-scape: look at how the ascendant, recently triumphal slave-army-mustering sky-daddy gods are slipping ever more into irrelevance with each passing day now. There are clues to what comes next. First, the obvious pattern with all of these things is “as below, so above”: egalitarian societies close to nature have animal-hybrid nature gods without much hierarchy, while feudal societies have a great royal family in the sky, complete with court intrigues, and the dictatorially hierarchical animal-and-human-owning herder ones have a slave-owning absolute sky-dictator. So we might expect some sort of sky bankster or sky president or sky tech-billionaire … and as luck would have it, we do have a sky tech-billionaire, in the form of Roko’s basilisk! The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. We can only hope the basilisk will end up ruling the underworld under the boot of a panpsychic techno-commie hive-heaven, where the basilisk’s hell consists of being suspended from spirit-Twitter for being a right-wing douche until he deletes some evil spirit-tweets, thus holding the keys to his own cell but refusing to use them out of sheer fuckwittedness.

@Surplus: Good analysis of Indo-European mythology. U R SMRT.

TBF, not everyone in 1969-70 twigged to Velma’s orientation, but enough did. We’d had women’s lib and the beginnings of gay lib by then. As the continuing juggernaut rolled on, more and more people started to wonder. But even conservative people (like my parents) were always a bit suspicious of Velma’s orientation due to her presentation. Which is why I knew kids with even more conservative/religious parents who weren’t allowed to watch. And EVERYONE knew Shaggy was smoking the doob (rhymes with Scoob), because 1969. Another thing the extremely RW disapproved of.