The mistake is in thinking physical difference is the same as genetic difference, when it’s trivial to show that’s not the case,** Starving Asspipe**.
Further, it’s society that puts some physical differences as more noticeable than others in our minds. There’s no good and logical reason why skin color and hair texture are so prominent in our classifications – it could be just as easily height, or nose size and shape, or teeth arrangement/color, or muscularity, or hair color, or a million other characteristics. But our society categorizes people by skin color and hair texture most prominently, to the point that people with half or 75% or even more European “white” ancestry can still be classified as “black” if their skin is dark enough, and hair kinky enough. Even when skin color can be variable through one’s life, just as height and other characteristics are, whether through the sun, natural processes, diet, or genetics.
These classifications and even our own perceptions are based on society and history far more than biology and genetics.
As an extremely clear example, Starving Artist, google “Andaman Islanders”. How would you classify those folks?
Selma was rated positively by Rotten Tomatoes reviewers but it was also vehemently criticized by others; this shows she wasn’t immune from taking flak due to PCness. To act as if there was some kind of inordinate Selma lovefest going on is to misrepresent the truth.
Why be surprised when reviewers rate one movie positively and a completely different one negatively? As much as it probably pains your eyes to read, Selma was a great movie. It doesn’t require any nefarious PC bias to have this opinion. With respect to her latest project, if it sucks, it sucks, and we should expect reviewers to say so if indeed this is the case.
Apparently you only want to believe Rotten Tomatoes when it supports your “DuVernay sucks!” narrative. I’m not the foolish one here.
I’m about to say something crazy, so you might want to sit down.
Op-ed writers and other persons routinely get paid to publish their views about movies (and other subjects), and are somehow allowed to bypass the hallowed gatekeepers of Rotten Tomatoes when they do so.
Of-fucking-course everyone knows it, Captain Obvious. What’s racist is to then rate them with respect to film making abilities, or intelligence, without taking into account socio/econo/geo/historic factors which play a far larger roll than genetic code.
You putz.
That doesn’t make them “critics”. When that term is used in the same paragraph as “movie” or “film”, it has a very specific meaning: people who are paid to write movie reviews and generally get to go to early screenings. I thought everyone knew this. I guess human ignorance goes deeper than I ever guessed.
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Dunning Kruger in action.
Yes. Film-making is genetic, you see. Not cultural or environmental at all. If there aren’t any well-known great films from African-Americans, it’s because original African populations from which they are descended lacked the film-making gene. Fortunately for them and us, they have a great natural sense of rhythm and are really great at basketball.
You don’t mean to suggest that the disproportionate racial makeup of the NBA and college basketball ranks has anything to do with genetics? Surely it must be some sort of discrimination against white players. Right? :dubious:
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This’ll probably get me lambasted, but I really disliked the movie because of the race lifting. Specifically the way they race lifted the Murrays so hard that they had to make Charles Wallace a recent adoptee because of it.
Such a recent adoptee that it was ludicrous that he’d have any attachment at all to his absent father.
I mean, yes, I admit that I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t race lift at all - a character’s race is part of the character’s definition. Hell, I oppose even changing hair color.
But if you feel you must race lift, due to whatever noble or dubious reason you feel justifies it, do not do it in a way that destroys the narrative.
Not that this was the only problem with the movie, though it was one that I was unable to put out out my mind through its entire run. I like the book and I like other adaptations of it (including the prior disney movie), but this movie was shit.
Actually it does, by definition. Right now you are responding to bunch of critics too. Perhaps not movie critics, but critics just the same.
My point (which still alludes you, unsurprisingly) is that there has never been a shortage of voices “brave” enough to criticize DuVernay’s movies. If you want to act like this ipoint doesn’t counter your opinion about Movie CriticsTM giving her an unfair PC pass, then by all means ignore it. But stop acting like Rotten Tomatoes is the sole arbiter of what people think and the possible biases they may or may not have. Because it is embarrassing to see you go on this way.
Rotten Tomatoes bases its rating on rough “up” and “down” votes from a variety of critics. The criticism could easily take the form of:
“I recommend this movie, but the way it treats LBJ is unfair…”
“I recommend this movie, even with its sour note of the portrayal of LBJ…”
“On balance I recommend this movie, even with its ahistorical treatment of LBJ…”
There. Based on these three hypothetical critics, Rotten Tomatoes would give the film a 100% “Fresh”, even though each of them has independently criticized the movie on a specific issue. Attacked it, one might say, even if they recommend the movie overall.
As personal advice, if you ever feel compelled to respond with an “AHA!” and go on to try to demonstrate that you’re smarter than the person you’re responding to, try to suppress that impulse because it won’t convince anyone of anything and runs the considerable risk of you embarrassing yourself. There are more diplomatic and measured approaches to calling “bullshit” on someone.
Or perhaps it could be social and economic factors causing one group over another to privilege sports as a career. Which is pretty fucking common in countries with totally different ethnic backgrounds to the United States: In New Zealand and Australia rugby and league there is a strong representation of Maori and Pasifika players, if not managers, coaches and owners. Now, Maori and Polynesian populations separated from African populations quite a long time ago, so unless you’re arguing that brown people per se are better at sports, if you want to explain why African-Americans, like Polynesians, are highly represented in professional sports, you can look at historical, economic, cultural and social similarities before deciding that there’s a gene for football.
Since several people have questioned my comments under the apparent premise that my acknowledging genetic ‘racial’ differences between groups of people either makes me a racist or gives ammo to racists, I’ll just make a generic statement rather than posting responses to each one who queried me.
No, I am not of the belief that any race of humans is genetically inferior to any others, nor genetically less talented, nor genetically less compassionate, etc., and I never have. Where I draw the line is where the argument is put forth that there’s no such thing as ‘race’ and that we’re all the same genetically. The differences may be (and obviously are) physical, but those differences still exist. Thus the argument put forth by iiandiiii is largely specious, and to the degree it’s correct it’s a distinction without a difference.
Why don’t people realize that making claims such as that there’s no such thing as race and that the idea there is is nothing more than a social construct comes across as willful denial of facts and an insistence on turning a blind eye to the truth? And then when you throw the insult of ‘racist’ at those who point out the ‘obvious’, you only make yourselves appear even more disingenuous and agenda-driven rather than fact-driven, and this gives ammo to your opposition, who use it to claim that you can’t prove one race or the other is equal to the rest (and I’m not saying this is so), so you concoct the claim we’re all the same genetically in order to assert what you can’t prove otherwise.
I’m largely in favor of many of liberalism’s goals, but I find myself pretty much 100% in opposition to the way you go about trying to achieve them, and the liberal insistence on turning a blind eye to the truth when the truth is inconvenient is certainly one of them. The proper approach would be education, rather than denial of the obvious and calling people names when they point out that you’re either wrong or dissembling in ways that have no real significance.
These are mostly straw man arguments. Race is a sociological classification. There are African groups considered “black” that are more closely related to Europeans and Asians than to various other African groups. That last sentence, by itself, is entirely factual (and incredibly easy to demonstrate), and disproves the notion that “black” is a valid distinct biological or genetic classification. The same goes for “white” and “Asian” and other very vague racial groupings. Yes, many African groups are more closely related to each other than to non-African groups, but not all. And many non-African groups, which are not closely related to Africans at all, have “black” skin color and hair texture and other features (like the Andaman Islanders). Are the Andaman Islanders black or Asian? Or some other grouping?
These groups come from history and culture, not science. There are valid biological groupings – West African ethnicities, North African ethnicities, Southeast Asian ethnicities, Native American ethnicities, etc. – most or all of these groups are genetically closer, on average, to others within their own grouping than to other groups (though there are no “pure” groups, and all of these have various admixtures within them). But those aren’t “races”.
Science has disproven the biological validity of the historical and sociological concept of race. It doesn’t mean there aren’t any valid biological/genetic human groupings – there are – but they’re not “race” groupings.
You could have stopped there, since there are plenty of people willing to question your comments on the sole basis that you have a long and storied history of being completely wrong about everything.
It’s justifiably reflexive at this point: “Starving Artist said something? Well, I guess it’s my turn to point out how wrong he is on whatever the topic happens to be.”
Feel free to take this personally.
And the fact that in football, you often see white guys on the offensive line, much less so on the defensive line, and almost never in the defensive secondary? This is also some sort of complex brew of social and economic factors? Man, the lengths the SSSM “blank slate” crowd will go to cling to their paradigm!
I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that my junior high football coach had the best black athletes play CB, WR, and RB, and the best white athletes (a couple of whom were just as fast as the fastest black kid) play QB and LB. That guy was probably the only coach in the country who ever did anything like that.