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March 19, 2022 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
43:50
American Ideological Colonisation with Erik
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Hey, how's it going?
It's been a while since I've done a late night stream.
Honestly, it's because I go to bed at like 11:30 these days.
So I'm kind of tired, but I saw a video that kind of bugged me, and I thought I'd just do this out of the blue.
Because I had nothing better to do, but I can go to bed and get a good night's rest, which I'm not going to do today.
But thankfully, it's Sunday tomorrow, so I get to lay in.
Anyway, how's it going, chat?
I'll sort out everything else.
Not late, I know, right?
I know.
I bet you're shocked.
What is this in the chat?
Yeah, I know, right?
Yeah, how's it going, guys?
You're right.
Hope you're all doing very well.
Frog juice.
Everyone should know that the best time for sex is in the morning.
Oh.
Oh, I should be watching EFAP, to be honest.
But normally I watch stuff these days while I'm painting my Warhammer miniatures like the absolute Chad I am.
And before you judge, I just don't give a damn about your opinion on it.
I do it for me.
But I do also put it on the net, so I'm going to show you it.
Check this dude out.
This is my Judicia.
He's like a trainee chaplain.
But look how good.
Don't worry about my painting.
Look at the quality of the model.
This guy's a badass.
Look at this sword.
Like, what I love about the sword, it's not even sharp at the end.
Oh, no, this is a sword I'm going to hack you with.
But I was really, really proud of this painting.
This took me ages.
And I worked really hard on the a la card long coat that he's wearing.
But I'm really, really pleased with him.
He came out quite well.
I should have put more light on him though when I was taking the photo.
But yeah, no, I thought he came out well.
But I was really quite happy with the lightning effect on the Blade Master's power sword.
The Blade Guard, sorry, Blade Guard veteran.
Yeah, I was quite happy with the shield too.
A little lightning effect on there as well in purple.
Because why not?
But that's not what we're here to talk about.
We're here to talk about diversity.
We're talking about inclusion.
We're here to talk about very good opinions on opposing wokeness.
Very American opinions on opposing wokeness.
Because I was watching Arch's stream, which is probably still going on right now.
So sorry, Arch.
friend of mine obviously and uh i saw he was talking about video by this tomato called sorry i shouldn't I don't know this guy.
Internet comment etiquette with Eric.
And he had done a video complaining about people complaining about Lord of the Rings obviously being woke.
And so I haven't really watched this guy's channel before.
I've heard of it, but I've never watched it in the videos, really.
And so I watched this video, and it seems to be literally him complaining a very surface-level complaint about someone and then complaining about their comments section.
It's like, right.
And in this video, he has the audacity to complain that the quartering, Jeremy, another friend of mine, by the way, has like goes through news articles and comments on events that are happening.
And he's like, oh, yeah, that just seems lazy.
It's like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, what he's doing seems really lazy.
Like, dude, don't forget to get your advert in.
Like, come on.
Okay.
Everyone else is lazy, buddy.
It's them.
But okay, so the entire premise of this video was him essentially sarcastically portraying a MAGA chud, an anti-woke MAGA chud.
I don't have my mag cap.
It's on the floor.
Fuck.
I should have got it for the bit.
But anyway, he's portraying this anti-woke MAGA chud.
And the idea that anyone could have any complaints about woke remakes other than they just hate black people is just off the table.
And there's nothing more to talk about.
Like, literally, no one has a legitimate complaint other than the fact that they don't like black people, which is, of course, not a legitimate complaint, but they're just bigots, is what he's saying.
They love white people.
They hate black people.
And they're obsessed with race.
The people commenting on the woke Lord of the Rings, they're obsessed with race.
They can't stop thinking about race.
I mean, it's the only critique that Eric has brought up of these people's views.
But it's them who have the problem with race.
And I just was just struck by how embarrassingly American this perspective is.
And this is why I've called this American Ideological Colonization, because that's what this is.
And it's gross.
So Eric obviously knows nothing about like wokeness or, you know, social justice, intersectionalism.
He's never read an essay by Kimberly Crenshaw.
He's never read anything by Derek Bell or any of the other people who explicitly state what their intentions are and why they're doing it.
So he doesn't know any of the things that underpin what the left-wing social justice movement is about.
And so when they wear the mask saying, well, look, we're just here for black people and anyone who disagree with us, well, they just hate black people.
Well, why would I expect Eric to know any different?
And of course, I don't.
However, I do think that there are some legitimate concerns that can be raised.
I mean, I'm not expecting a sincere response from Eric.
You know, don't at me, Eric, because I don't expect you to say anything of any value.
But I think it's instructive for people who may watch his video and may perhaps also watch this one.
Because there is actually a great depth of ideology behind the terms diversity and inclusiveness, and they're being done for a reason.
And I think this is the thing that is worth focusing on most.
It is the will behind what is going on.
There is a will at play, Eric.
And the problem with this will is that it's quite nefarious.
And the people manifesting it are actually open and explicit about what their intentions are.
And I don't like their intentions.
And so when they get their hands on a new property, I mean, they don't actually have the rights to Lord of the Rings.
This is.
I can't remember exactly what it was about Lord of the Rings.
They had the rights to be a very small slice of the canon.
And they've done their best to ruin that as well.
It didn't take long for them to...
I think I actually have an article back here.
Yeah, there we go.
The controversial change is they're basically compressing a thousand years of canon history of Lord of the Rings into one series.
And it's like, right, sure.
Why not?
I mean, it's going to be terrible.
But anyway, the problem is that when you see someone who you know has a nefarious intent acting upon something which you cherish, you tend not to be very happy with that.
And whichever way this nefarious intent manifests itself will be the thing that you point to and say, that is something I don't agree with because it wasn't the intent of the authorial voice of the person who wrote it is being disrespected.
And you might say, well, why do you care?
What difference does that make?
And the thing is, the author's intent actually matters.
I don't agree with the death of the author.
And the, or at least not entirely, anyway, there's a lot to talk about there, which I'm not going to go into now.
Refuse to explain myself.
Carry on.
There's a lot to talk about because the purpose of a work, I mean, just very briefly, actually, if you take away an author, then you can't really have a story, right?
You don't have an aesthetic experience where you are engaging with a piece of material, a piece of art, someone's work, in the same way as you do have an aesthetic experience with something that is not created with intent.
So even if you don't know the author's intent, you know that there was an author to it.
And the easiest way to distinguish this is looking at natural beauty.
Unless, of course, you're a person who believes in God.
I happen to be still a dirty atheist.
But you know that there wasn't a design behind showing you a beautiful scene.
So when you get to a particularly high place, you take in a vast, sweeping landscape, and you're subsumed in natural beauty.
But you don't think that someone directed you to appreciate this natural beauty.
This is just you appreciating nature.
And you can discover things about yourself by doing it.
What is it that you notice?
What draws your attention?
And why does that matter to you?
And you can learn things about yourself.
But the thing is, you can't do that when you're reading a work of fiction because you know that no matter even if you don't know who the author was, you know that there was an author and the author put themselves into the work.
And in fact, what you can see from the work allows you to derive intent and attitude and concerns and what's important from the author.
And this is an important thing.
This tells you about what kind of story you're dealing with, what you're supposed to be looking for, what you can learn, what the author is trying to teach you.
Again, even if you don't know who that author is, you can still derive all of this.
And this leads us to the sort of genuine love and appreciation for a work that you can't really get if the work is being made with the explicit intention to break the spell that a piece of art creates.
And that's the problem with woke Lord of the Rings, Eric.
So let me, I've got a couple of this.
Let me just grab a few things.
So the thing is, this intersectional social justice movement, Eric, and I'm not accusing you of being a part of it at all.
I'm sure you're not.
And even if you are, who cares?
The thing is, for anyone who's done any amount of reading of their material, they will come away with the understanding that they believe every piece of material, every artwork, every rule, every law, every principle is racially coded.
They believe that things are intrinsically racial.
Now, again, this is a very American perspective.
It's a very American perspective.
I can't think of anywhere else in the world where they really think, maybe in like South Africa, I suppose, you know, other countries that have got a history of colonization, maybe they think like that.
But in most of the old world, this is not what people think like.
People think in terms of nationality and ethnicity, and they think in terms of religion.
They think in terms of ideas and movements.
They don't think in terms of just skin color.
Skin colour is actually not very important in the old world.
I mean, where would you, why would you care?
You know, what difference does it make?
There are much more important things over here.
But I suppose we don't have 400 years of racial slavery and the guilt that then comes along with that afterwards.
So, okay, I can see from an American position this important to you, but this actually isn't yours.
Because what we're talking about with Tolkien is English mythology.
It's old world mythology.
It's mythology that speaks to something that is not American and doesn't carry the American cultural baggage and doesn't carry the American cultural pathologies.
And therefore, you inserting, colonizing, if you will, this English mythology with your Americanisms is just kind of gross.
It's just kind of weird.
It makes you guys Americans, and I'm sorry for the Americans who oppose this stuff, but these guys are a reflection of your culture.
And you know this.
It makes you look ignorant at the very least.
I mean, again, I mean, look at what I'm criticizing.
Yeah, it's the Workal of the Rings that makes you look ignorant.
I mean, look at this.
But like I said, I'm not expecting any kind of sensible response from Eric.
At the very best, I would have been expecting to go, oh, here's a sarcastic reply that doesn't address the meat of anything I'm saying.
But the point is, if we were to take the social justice movement on its face, right, it wouldn't do to the cultural artifacts of other cultures, non-American cultures, what it does to them, right?
If Hollywood wanted to raise the stature and status of black people, it wouldn't do this.
I mean, this is embarrassing, right?
I mean, if I got a knock on my door and they're like, Carl, Carl, quick, we need someone to play MLK, and we've decided it's you.
I'd be like, I think you might have the wrong person.
I think there are actually legitimate reasons why you wouldn't choose me.
Starting first, I'm not an actor.
B, I think the guy who plays MLK should probably try and look a little bit like MLK.
And I don't really think I have the forgivability of Robert Downey Jr., okay?
We're not going to blackface me up.
I'm not Justin Trudeau.
We're not zero pictures of me in blackface.
I don't want there to be one, really.
Again, not that anyone outside of America cares about that.
Again, another American pathology.
But I'm aware that Americans are kind of weird.
So I don't intend on falling into that trap.
It's about cultural sensitivity, Eric.
But you wouldn't do this to a black person if you wanted them to feel legitimate, right?
Because this is done purely under the assumption that black people are somehow inferior to other people.
It's disgusting, really.
It's absolutely fucking disgusting.
It's weird that Americans have got absolutely no knowledge of civilizations from Africa.
It's just so weird.
Like, there are legitimately, like, I mean, I would love to see a genuinely decent dramatization of Shaka Zulu.
Now, there have been them, but, you know, these were in the 50s and 60s.
So I would like to see a modern remake.
Because, I mean, if I recall correctly, I think he was murdered by his own brother.
Like, is there not a dramatic?
Like, this is like the sub-Saharan African Julius Caesar revolutionizes warfare, turns the Zulu from being a backwards, nothing tribe into the hegemons of the area in which they are.
And then I think he's murdered by his own brother.
And it's like, right, there's a story there.
Like, there's a genuine story with human drama in it.
But fuck you, black people.
Hollywood's going to dress you up in whiteface, basically.
Because remember, the racial ideologues don't agree that the stories that white people have told are stories black people could tell.
Right?
They think that.
I don't think this, but they think this.
And this obsession with race, you end up tying yourselves in knots over it.
But it means that what you're saying is a black person is only legitimate when they're doing this.
Like, you're not making movies about Africans.
You're making movies about Europeans and putting Africans in their place and saying, right, you've made it.
That's the assumption that the European is innately superior and they're not.
It's just you're fucking racists.
And you're too ignorant and shallow to understand this.
It's really gross.
It's absolutely despicable.
And the thing is, right?
It's not that, like, they think this completely, but the assumption is that Europeans, like all of the other races, as far as they're concerned, are just like, this is well, it's this, everything, and then white.
It's like, what are you talking about?
Like, what do you, like, I guess maybe it's because I'm conversant with history.
I just look back at history and think, I mean, you know, almost every empire, almost every great people in history didn't come from Europe.
Like, they're not Europeans.
So you guys, again, it seems just a very new world way of looking at this.
Because for the last 300 years, that's been the case.
But that's a really, really small segment of time.
You know, I mean, my culture, the culture you guys are currently bastardizing, is 1,500 years of recorded history.
So it's like, okay, you guys are like, oh, yeah, for the last 300 years.
Okay, but like, look at all of the time before that.
Like, it's really ignorant.
It's really shallow.
It's really pathetic.
and it's really demeaning to black people.
Like I feel bad that these people are going to always, this woman here is always gonna have the stigma of diversity higher around her.
People are always going to intuit this outside of America.
I'm sure in America, everyone's like, oh, well, it's so stunning and brave.
But it's not.
And it's part of an ideological attack against what the intersectionals, the diversity and inclusion folks, consider to be a kind of white hegemony.
Because this is racial, like we said, and it can't be made into something else.
It can't be appreciated by non-white people in their view, even though Lord of the Rings especially absolutely is appreciated all around the world.
And that's what they themselves say.
So anyway, what I was going to get at is the point about aesthetics, right?
So aesthetics, the aesthetic experience of a piece of work, comes from our interaction with it, right?
It's how we feel about the work.
The work itself is non-aesthetic, right?
It doesn't have a magical property that is aesthetic, but the non-aesthetic properties in some way that seems to be philosophically indeterminate at this point combine in our minds to produce a particular kind of experience.
And these are not necessary experiences.
These seem to be contingent on many different things.
And there's no formula that you can say, well, this is the thing.
But there are certain predictabilities.
For example, a really good example of this is Harry Potter, right?
J.K. Rowling, when I remember years ago, and I didn't understand at the time why this was significant, but apparently when they were casting for Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling was just like, no Americans.
I found that really funny.
But why?
Why no Americans?
I believe there was an American in it, actually, but generally the general rule was no Americans.
And I understand that what she is trying to do is preserve the aesthetic of a British public school, which is actually a private school for Americans.
Don't know why we call them public schools, to be honest.
But the point is she's trying to portray a posh school, a posh English school.
And so she has credentialed English actors or British actors.
And these people give a certain sense to the thing because they come from a particular place.
They exist in a particular time.
And if you take them and replace them with someone else, like Americans, who also come from a particular place and exist in a particular time and have a different culture, a noticeably different culture, you get a different aesthetic experience.
And that's something she was concerned about because she wanted to craft a particular illusion.
It would seem strange if you had a school that was based on English schools to be filled with Americans all speaking in their American lingo, their American accents, using American words.
It'd be weird.
And it wouldn't give, it wouldn't carry the same effect to the audience.
And the audience therefore wouldn't engage with it in the same way.
They wouldn't cherish it in the way that Harry Potter fandom cherishes Harry Potter.
And that's the problem that we are seeing with this Lord of the Rings.
This breaks the willing suspension of disbelief in the material.
You can't look at this and not know that there is a will operating on this property that is alien to the property, has colonized the property, and is trying to do something to you using the property.
And that's the problem, isn't it?
Because from the group of people who say that everything is political, well, if you're going to deliberately flout the law of the work that you're going to be adapting, then I can only assume you think, well, not you, Eric, of course, the people may, they think that this is a political maneuver.
And I don't really like being acted upon in ways that otherwise would be hidden from me.
Like people who try and conceal their intentions and then present it and say, well, don't you love this?
It looks very much like a skin suit to me.
It's very gross.
Like, you've torn off Tolkien's work, plastered it of your own faces, and then say, right, now kiss.
It's like, sir, I'm not going to have any kind of passionate interaction with something I know is doing something deceitful and has an agenda that I didn't sign up for.
That's fundamentally what this is about.
It's about integrity and honesty.
It's about sincerity.
It's about being genuine about the thing that you're doing.
And the respect I expect to have accorded to me as someone who you wish to have an aesthetic experience with your work, that's already gone.
Broken at the very first hurdle.
I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do that.
Why would I do that?
You'll be like, oh, you just hate black people.
Oh, brilliant take, Eric.
Brilliant.
That's right.
All of these layers under you.
No, you're right.
Just hate black people because I'm an American and I literally can't think outside of that frame.
I mean, one of the people that Eric criticizes is my friend Arch.
What experience of black people do you think Norwegians have?
Like, he lives at, like, God knows what latitude in a tiny Norwegian village.
How many black people do you think are there, Eric?
Do you think he's just racist?
Because he's just all these blacks doing things that he hates.
No, idiot.
Idiot.
This is about the aesthetic fidelity of the piece.
This is not about race.
These people are merely using race as a way of puppeteering you.
As a way of making you be their defender for free, I assume.
I mean, you did at the end of your video spend a lot of time like plugging like you know, Amazon's Lord of the Rings.
Where is it?
Like, even like gets up their little fucking thing at some point at the end.
But like, it's just, it's just weird.
Where is it?
Anyway, there we go.
Like, it's like, yeah, go and watch it on September 7th.
Are you being paid to say that?
Are you just doing this for them?
You have become a conscripted foot soldier for Amazon?
Like, you're the, I mean, I hope you're being paid.
Because if not, you're doing this for free.
You're promoting Amazon.
And, like, wasn't this worth like a billion dollars, this series?
Like, you're, but they don't even need to pay you to do this.
You're just being conscripted in for free to do this.
Because you take black people.
Just, it's so, like, it's such a useful idiot, mate.
You're being absolutely useful.
And the thing is, you'll be like, well, oh, how do you know?
How do you know?
Well, I mean, they say, they say, like, sorry, is it this one?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So here we go.
Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power is already correcting the Lord of the Rings.
Biggest flaw.
Oh, God.
Lord of the Rings had flaws, did it?
Let me try and think about what those flaws are and get whatever just fell in my eye out of my eye.
Hmm.
Well, I mean, I suppose, I suppose, you could argue that they truncated parts of the story because it was already like eight hours long.
And so they left out Tom Bombardil, but in their defense, Tom Bomberdill is a really annoying character.
Let me think.
I can't think of many flaws in Lord of the Rings.
Okay, I really can't.
It's a brilliantly adapted work.
And that is because Peter Jackson was like, look, we're going to stay as faithful to this source material as we can.
We are literally, and you can tell that they lifted parts of the dialogue directly into the movie, large parts of the dialogue, and that's to their credit because they want to create the atmosphere that people had and felt the same emotions when they were reading the book.
But no, the biggest flaw here, the show is finally fixing Lord of the Rings diversity problem.
Think about what that means.
Think about what that means, right?
A thing is defined by what it includes and what it excludes, right?
If you have a series, if you're trying to create a mythical fantasy realm, or any kind of art, to be honest, all art is about casting spells on the person watching, on the person imbibing it.
The person who has the aesthetic experience that you've given them, that you've just given them a canvas.
It's just a canvas with pigments on.
It doesn't move.
And yet, some paintings can feel alive and draw you in to a story that you can't escape.
And you go away thinking about, God, yeah, it's resonated in me because the experience is happening in your head.
But that is the artist's craft to be able to cast this spell that you can't stop thinking about.
And nope, not anymore.
Now it's about political representation.
And if you don't think it's political, well, again, it's because you haven't read a single thing that the people who promote diversity and inclusion have written.
You don't know anything about these people.
It's like, okay, thus far, I wouldn't expect it.
It's pretty esoteric.
I mean, it is everywhere.
It is trillion-dollar corporations shilling out this stuff.
Amazon's only putting all their money behind this.
I mean, not all of their money, obviously, but these huge budgets, budgets that some countries don't even reach.
But don't worry, I'm sure there's nothing nefarious going on here.
But we've got a quote.
We've got a particular quote.
Oh, there's a complaint that female characters are few and far between.
Hmm, it's interesting.
Where is the quote?
Here we go.
I think it's this one.
So, yeah, they knew they'd face a backlash from Tolkien fans over the diverse casting.
How did they know?
How could they know?
Except Tolkien spends a lot of time fleshing out the cultures and the people who make up those cultures in Middle-earth.
In fact, the what's the term for it?
It was on the back of my mind before I just came before I started the stream, but I've forgotten the term.
Sort of the anthropology of the thing, right?
As in, when I go to a place, I see the people and they have distinct characteristics.
And from these characteristics, you draw the aesthetics of them.
But they knew that this was going to be the case.
They knew.
Like, here's where's this showrunner?
Lindsay Weber, the executive producer.
It only felt natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien's work would reflect what the world actually looks like.
Which world?
Our world?
Why?
Why the fuck would we want Lord of the Rings to reflect what the real world looks like?
Like, and what?
What?
So, what sense does that make?
Like, if I want to know what the real world looks like, I'll literally walk outside.
This is why I can't understand, like, you know, fat representation and things.
So, oh, we don't see any fat people on TV.
Oh, don't worry.
I see them all day, every day.
I am one, right?
It's fine.
You know, we know what fat people are like.
They're represented everywhere in real life.
You know, I'd like to actually get away into a bit of escapism.
Fantasy.
Again, the illusion that is cast from a piece of art.
The things you put in it matter.
But for some reason, Lindsay, the executive producer of a major Hollywood production, doesn't understand any of these things.
Like, how can you get to that point without understanding that, right?
But she does have an ideology.
Her ideology is inclusivity and diversity.
And this means, we'll just summarize a social justice.
And this means that this ideology, this new religion, has to be implanted in everything that we do.
As she said, Tolkien is for everyone.
His stories are about fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their cultures and come together.
What?
What are we talking about?
Why are you bringing that up?
Why are you bringing up for everyone this inclusivity?
No, it's not.
Tolkien isn't for people who don't like Tolkien.
Lord of the Rings is not for people who don't like Lord of the Rings.
I mean, there are millions of Lord of the Rings fans, but there are also billions of people who aren't Lord of the Rings fans, and it's not for them.
Again, exclusivity is an innate part of all art.
You will never create a work of art that satisfies anyone.
And the closer you get to that, the more simple and shallow that work of art would have to be.
And some of the most niche art is also some of the most complex.
Look at things like Lovecraft is a great example of this.
Very, very niche, very, very particular in its aesthetic.
There are a lot of things that it excludes and a very narrow band of things that it includes.
And that's why the people who find that attractive, the people who derive the aesthetic experience that Lovecraft is going for, find it resonates with them.
Now, with Tolkien, it was millions of people because Tolkien was a brilliant writer because he knew what he was trying to achieve.
He was trying to achieve a mythos, an epic.
And the good thing about an epic is that it doesn't need to be, nothing needs to be done in order to include people.
If virtues and vices and conflict resonate, then they will resonate across cultures.
And there are plenty of cultures who don't appreciate this.
There are plenty of cultures who do.
There are plenty of individuals within each culture who do and don't appreciate it.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is fidelity to the work.
Because without the fidelity to the work, you end up losing the people who do appreciate it without winning over those people who don't appreciate it.
And the only people who are satisfied with this are people who are fundamentally racists.
People who literally can't look at a piece of art and say, if there's not a person in that with my skin colour, then I don't like it.
And this is entirely the premise of the social justice movement.
They don't believe that, say, black people can appreciate pieces of art with white people in.
They don't believe that white people can appreciate pieces of art with black people in.
And they all think in this American framework where it's literally about race, whereas in most people's framework, it's about fidelity, authenticity.
And the thing is, I know that Hollywood knows this, right?
This is just the Wikipedia page for Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings, which seems to have been well received by its audiences.
It was like 7.2 or something on Rotten Tomatoes from the audience or whatever it is.
It did quite well, right?
But it's the word.
The studio was adamant that the actors be of Chinese descent to audition for the character.
Why?
Didn't they want inclusivity and diversity?
It's really weird, isn't it?
And it's because, and they know this, that they wanted this to do well in China because it was supposed to be a Chinese-themed Marvel character.
And if you want a Chinese-themed Marvel character, well, you need to have something that is authentically Chinese.
And if you don't have that, you don't end up casting the spell.
That is the artistic experience that people look at the thing without any explanation from you and draw from that what they interpret the thing to be.
And you don't need to do anything special.
All you have to do is try and stay on point with the source material.
It's not very difficult.
I mean, it's just so obvious that it's just most people would have no question about it.
But why wouldn't you do that?
You wouldn't do that if you had an agenda.
And if you have an agenda, say, making it like, look what the world actually looks like, rather than what Tolkien's world actually is supposed to look like.
It's for everyone.
Well, what are they saying with this then?
This isn't for everyone.
What are they saying with this?
Is this not for white people?
Is this not for black people?
Is this not for Indian people or South American people?
This is just for Chinese people.
No, of course not.
You know, and no normal person is looking at this going, well, it's just got Chinese people in.
I can't watch this.
No black person probably was like, oh, I can't watch Lord of the Rings.
That's going to be black people in it.
I can't believe for a second that a single person was like that.
But this is the political ideology.
And so, you know, you, Eric, just being like, ooh, you just hate black people.
No.
I think people don't like having political propaganda put in their faces when that is expressly what this is.
Again, it just ruins the reality of the thing.
When you are creating a piece of art, you're creating something that in its own little pocket dimension in your head becomes real.
It has coherence.
It has internal consistency.
And when this is broken, then the spell is broken.
And so when you insert in front of me, oh, I don't know if I was watching.
This is why the bloopers are so funny when it's like they're filming the Mandalorian and someone's left a Pepsi on the background or something.
instantly the spell's broken that can't be explained through the i mean i've just made that I don't know whether that was actually the case.
But there have been examples of things like this.
And it's like, look, when that's brought in, right, that's like a high crime in art because this can't be explained within the universe.
And if you can't explain it within the universe, then what you're saying to the people is, no, you've got to step back and realize you're just watching moving pictures on a screen.
You're not having this magical experience anymore.
You're just sat there and you're just giving us the money and the whole effect is ruined.
And why would I bother?
If you can't be bothered to be internally consistent to the story you're trying to tell, why would I bother trying to engage with it?
And you can be like, you're racist.
Okay.
Okay, I'm also racist against corporations by that measure then.
But this is the entire point.
And so when you sit there and go, yeah, so we've got this black beardless dwarf princess, like, okay, you can do whatever you like with it.
It's not my property.
You can't expect me to believe that you're approaching this in good faith, like with respect to me as the recipient of your piece of art and saying, yeah, so you're going to like this, aren't you?
No.
You hate black people, don't you?
No.
You are a bad person, therefore, you should give us your money.
No.
None of that is a coherent argument to start with.
This is weird.
I can tell this is you injecting your politics in front of my face and then saying, right, enjoy the art.
And it's like, I can't.
Your politics is in front of my face.
You're deliberately profaning your own art and demanding that I engage in this profanity with you.
Like, I'm sorry, if you can't treat the thing you're making as sacred and you have to have a different agenda, like, which is, I mean, and let's let's be fair, right?
It's not like Hollywood.
It's not like it's our first fucking rodeo, is it, Eric, right?
I mean, look at this.
Just Stacey Abrams as the president of the earth in Star Trek.
Like, come on.
Like, come on, man.
Could you be any more on the nose about your political agendas?
This is like, God, stop punching me in the face.
Please.
She's like the governor of Georgia or something.
But again, like, we can't see that this is the American political ideology of the left that is colonizing yet another thing.
It's embarrassing.
Shouldn't be done.
Ruins the experience.
Again, takes me right out of whatever they were trying to craft here.
I mean, look at this.
Just, what am I supposed to be looking at?
So grim anyway.
I mean, I don't remember Star Trek being nearly this dull looking, frankly.
That's awful.
Again, Star Trek is something I used to love, but like this.
Can you even imagine loving this?
Like, who loves this?
Racists certainly love this.
But anyway, I know that you're putting, well, they are putting politics in my face when they do this.
They say it.
They literally say, we are correcting the biggest flaw.
We have a political interpretation of Lord of the Rings, and that makes Lord of the Rings flawed.
And it's like, yeah, but I don't have a political interpretation of Lord of the Rings.
And I don't think it's flawed.
I actually think it's rather good in the epic tale that it is telling.
Epic in the Aristotelian sense, by the way.
And this is important.
And it is entirely my enjoyment of this series.
It's contingent on that.
And that's why everyone says, well, this woke shit is garbage and it doesn't work for me.
It doesn't bring me in.
This is not trying to bring you in.
What it's trying to do is wear the thing you love as a fucking skin suit.
And then trying to get you to conform to their politics.
But the thing is, their politics is based on racial consciousness.
Based on the idea that all people in all times and all places are like dug into these.
Look up The Fourth Age, by the way.
You just did a great video.
I watched it this afternoon.
Where the people who do this, they believe they're in kind of racial channels.
I believe this is Ibrahim X. Kendi's view.
They're in racial channels.
And essentially, it's very segregationist.
These can't be mixed.
And I just don't believe any of this nonsense.
This is all bollocks.
And it's all very American.
And you've actively colonized probably, I mean, literally, I think it was 2012, this was voted England's favorite book.
Like, you've colonized one of the most cherished pieces of cherished cultural artifacts that my country has with your fucking American race bullshit.
I can't stand it.
I don't care about it.
Like, I don't want to see it.
I don't want to sit there and be reminded constantly that, by the way, some fucking woke Hollywood dipshit like Lindsey Weber is like going, me, me, me, me, me, inclining, community, me, me, me, race, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Just shut up.
Just shut up and talk about Lord of the Rings, not your politics.
I'm not having this nefarious shit happening.
I'm not going to pay for it.
I'm not going to engage with it.
I'm not going to watch it.
I'm not interested in it.
And I don't care what your opinion on that is, Eric.
You know, you can have your tepid, two-dimensional, smooth-brained take of it.
Literally, oh, Arch just hates black people.
The quartering just hates black people.
They just like white people.
No, maybe they just like Lord of the Rings.
Have you considered that?
Anyway, folks, I'm gonna leave it there, I think, because it's late.
We've covered the things I think matter.
Anyway, take it easy, folks.
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