Archive for 2018

OPEN THREAD: Make this one the threadiest yet!

HOLLYWOOD SHOULD ACCEPT FRANCES McDORMAND’S INCLUSION-RIDER DARE:

What you see on the screen is a matter of artistic vision. If you think a role calls for a black actor, then you’re not being unfair to Russell Crowe by casting Denzel Washington. But if you tell a lighting director that he can’t have the job he’s qualified for because he’s not gay or a woman, that’s a bit different.

Hollywood’s various powerful unions will likely be quick to point this out. As Christine Rosen of the Weekly Standard notes, the Costume Designers Guild is 80 percent female. So if we’re to take this idea seriously, a lot of qualified women are going to lose jobs to less qualified men. It would work in reverse for the Art Directors Guild, which is 73 percent male.

So why do I want Hollywood to go for it? Because Hollywood rarely practices what it preaches. We get lots of nice award-ceremony speeches about the superior values of Hollywood and how evil big business and Republicans are. We get lots of movies indicting capitalism and glorifying organized labor. The upshot of much of this stuff is that it’s easy to do the right thing, so when society does the wrong thing, it must be because evil people wish it so.

Well, here’s Hollywood’s chance to put its money where its biggest mouths are. And not just the amorphous entity called Hollywood, but the individual actors and directors who just love to preen about their enlightened views. Let’s see them prove they have the courage of their convictions.

Curiously, post-Weinstein and hashtag #metoo, I haven’t seen a lot of headlines on male Hollywood executives voluntarily retiring or retraining for other professions to make way for more women as studio heads or directors. Perhaps that will change now that Frances McDormand has spoken. What say you, Coen Brothers?

CNN PANELIST: IF YOU LAUGH AT TRUMP’S JOKES, YOU’RE DAMAGING SOCIETY.

We’re Time-Warner-CNN-HBO – only we get to damage society!

As Glenn wrote in January while leftists were freaking out over Trump’s “shithole” comments, “I’m amused when people who’ve spent 50 years declaring the very concept of decency repressive and outdated suddenly start with the ‘have you no decency?’ shtick. When Joseph Welch used that phrase, it was pretty much Peak Decency, or as we’re now told, a horrible regressive time of racism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia.”

REX MURPHY: THE CONTEMPTIBLE CONCEPT OF ‘WHITE PRIVILEGE’ IS JUST UGLY, ANGRY RACISM.

Justin Trudeau’s white privilege halo has collateral benefits. Under his privileged-plumed wing, a lot of candidates sailed to election victory, possibly even Caesar-Chavannes herself. Does she deplore its advantages when they play to her benefit? Does she chide the prime minister that he so represents what she so deplores? Hold your bets.

To wind things up, I think I’m with Bernier. Individuals are not robots, identical instances of the skin colour they are born with, the sexuality they practice, the religion they hold, or even — I admit this is stretching things when you consider the current Liberal caucus — the party they belong to.

Identity politics atomizes society, dissolves community, reduces a country to subsets of clans, one-dimensional interests, group thinking, and obscures the immense diversity of individual, specific lives and the people who live them.

But those who deploy such tactics view those results as a feature, not a bug. Or as Steve J. Allen wrote at the American Greatness Website on Friday, “Welcome to the New Class Warfare.”

Last year, Brendan O’Neil of Spiked wrote, It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common.”

Speaking of which, on Twitter today, PJM’s Charlie Martin resurrects this Washington Post column from last year by Marc Thiessen: “Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Millennial WaPo Columnist Says It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.

But back when the Washington Post still owned Newsweek, it had assured me that we were giving it a try.

Let me know when you’ve convinced Jeff Bezos to toss the keys to Amazon to the federal government, and then we’ll talk.

TWITTER REFUSES TO REVOKE LOUIS FARRAKHAN’S BLUE CHECKMARK DESPITE NUMEROUS ANTI-SEMITIC TWEETS:

When verification was first introduced in 2009, Twitter used it simply as a tool to confirm the identity of public figures. But years later, the platform shifted its stance, deciding to police the content of verified users to ensure they don’t violate user policy, which prohibits “promoting hate and/or violence against, or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.”

Twitter removed the verified status of prominent white-supremacists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler in November of last year, after banning alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos altogether in 2016.

At the Washington Times, Larry O’Connor adds, “David Duke is not verified…Meanwhile, Farrakhan just goes on tweeting with the coveted blue check mark next to his name. [On Wednesday] the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader posted a video saying the FBI and is an ‘enemy of black advancement’ and is controlled by ‘the Jews.’”

Why are Democrat-controlled institutions such cesspits of racism and anti-Semitism?