Saturday, June 25, 2022

Pro-abort advocates violence

Quotes: "I'm advocating for violence. I am advocating for violence. Light it on fire."



It is like she is drawing a straight line between abortion and violence, saying "I am not allowed to destroy a life in abortion anymore, so I will destroy other lives." Wow, who would ever have thought that abortion causes violence?

Monday, June 20, 2022

2020: Brian Stelter's "proof" of Biden's Fitness for the Highest Office

Too funny.

Well, Brian, bike-riding proficiency is a low bar, but he's failed at that now also.

Prediction on the Downfall of the MCU Coming To Pass

Disney/Pixar just laid a pretty big turd this weekend, so it seems like a good time to revisit my answer to a Quora question a year ago. It has garnered 75 likes in that time, and so I am kind of proud of that. Honestly I just rushed my answer out with a lot less work that I generally put into blog posts. The reason people like it is obviously not because of brilliant writing but because the message resonates with fans of stories of all sorts. Here's the text:

Will Marvel Studios’ “woke” stance backfire like the comics did?

If the storytelling goes downhill, then the MCU will fall. “Wokeness” seems to erect artificial barriers to good storytelling. For example, look at the Charlie’s Angels movie. All the women are Mary Sues and can all do just about everything. All the men are awful and easy for the women to beat. The old white guy turns out to be the villain and this surprises no one. The movie tanked and was deservedly mocked.

“Batwoman” is another recent cringeworthy example. Good storytelling takes a back seat to woke button-pushing, and it is one of the lowest rated things in the DC realm.

Having said all this, there are many macho-crap films, stuff as far from “woke” as possible, out there that suck as badly as Batwoman. They feature one-dimensional, steroid-jacked heroes and hot women posing merely damsels in distress. I have just never heard anyone insist that those examples of film-making are great. Not in the way people insist that Last Jedi or Rise of Skywalker is great storytelling when the plot holes in those films are gaping and their characters demonstrably less realistic.

The best of the older, cheesy action films didn’t suffer from macho or woke posturing. Commando didn’t take itself very seriously, but neither of the females comes across as a fearful damsel-y character, but rather tough characters with courage. Rae-Dawn Chong actually uses a rocket launcher to free Schwarzenegger from a paddy wagon. But if Chong was shown beating all these military guys up with Arnold sitting there cheering her on that would have ruined the story. I feel like there are a bunch of woke fans that want that, i.e., ruin the story for the sake of a narrative that shows that men need to take a back seat to women, not that men and women can work together, using different talents, to beat the bad guys. “Edge of Tomorrow” is a good example of a more recent example of this, along with the first “Avengers” film of course.

“Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is a good example of the latest MCU project which was not sure what it wanted to be. Quirky action romp or preachy geopolitical / racial statement? Fortunately, the great action scenes provided enough cover for fans like me to ignore the cringe-worthy monologuing and confusion about who really is the “bad guy”. But here’s the thing: I’m a hardcore comic movie fan. If the MCU takes the wrong message from its decent ratings and injects more statement and less fun into their products, they are going to lose a lot of audience. You have got to get normal people to see your movies. If you are just able to count people like me coming through to door then woke or not, you’ll go broke.

I added a number of comments over the months about new MCU movies. I noted that Spiderman did really well and was missing all the SJW virtue signaling. A guy whose first name was Mohammad showed up in the comments and agreed with me numerous times, providing his own insights and examples that I appreciated very much. Unfortunately he deleted all his comments. He may have been scared that people might see them and decide he is a _______phobe, so I do not blame him one bit.

There are many people out there calling this stuff out now and pointing out that political messaging destroys stories. So many in fact that a list would be sort of hard to make, but here is a partial one: Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Ryan Kinal, Infinity Girl, The Quartering, Clownfish TV, Geeks and Gamers and Odin's Movie Blog. A lot of these folks are great fellow travelers for traditional Christians and conservatives to follow and check out.