The Ghost of Comedy Past

Retroactive justice came to collect Kevin Hart the other day, for making gay jokes years ago on Twitter

NEW YORK (AP) — Just two days after being named host of the Academy Awards, Kevin Hart stepped down following an outcry over past homophobic tweets by the comedian.

Capping a swift and dramatic fallout, Hart wrote on Twitter just after midnight Thursday that he was withdrawing as Oscars host because he didn’t want to be a distraction. “I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past,” wrote Hart.

Hart, who is in Australia for a comedy tour, also tweeted Friday morning: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Hart’s invocation of MLK suggests he recognizes this all as a contest between the gays and blacks for leadership of the ruling diversity coalition. The gay faction presents itself as diverse, putting forward flamboyant minorities in its propaganda, but its elite is overwhelmingly white (sometimes I think the big LGBTQ push right now is largely a surreptitious way to keep whites and Jews in charge of the coalition of the fringes)

Earlier Thursday evening, the comedian had refused to apologize for tweets that resurfaced after he was announced as Oscars host on Tuesday. In a video on Instagram, Hart said the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave him an ultimatum: apologize or “we’re going to have to move on and find another host.”

“I chose to pass on the apology,” Hart said. “The reason why I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times.”

Anyone who refuses to apologize has to be commended for it, but I suspect Hart was only too glad to quit while he was behind. Doing the show after grovelling would be like second helping of grovelling–a show we can expect to be heavy on the LGBTQ propaganda. Participating in it after getting smacked down would have been too much humiliation for anyone capable of feeling it. It’s that and more for someone whose audience is disproportionately straight black men.

Hart was there to satisfy the “Oscars so white” hustle but ran afoul of the gay mafia. Now they’ll have a second chance to throw a sop to the “me too” shakedown. But a female host will likely be a disaster. Of course the Academy can be reassured by the fact it won’t be seen because no one watches the show any more

It’s not the first time an Oscars host has been derailed by anti-gay remarks. Ahead of the 2012 Academy Awards, producer Brett Ratner, who had been paired with host Eddie Murphy, resigned days after using a gay slur at a film screening. Murphy soon after exited, as well. 

That year, a tried-and-true Oscars veteran — Billy Crystal — jumped in to save the show, hosting for his eighth time. This time, speculation has already been rampant that few in Hollywood want the gig, for which few win glowing reviews.

Oh, I suspect there’ll be many “glowing reviews” for various performers in the near future–glowing craters marking careers nuked by pc outrages.

Host of the Oscars becoming the honor no one wants is sweet irony. You can expect the scrutiny normally reserved for a Supreme Court nominee, an army of volunteer censors combing through your past. It’s getting harder to cast this part. I imagine the various creative ways people come up with to turn down the job.

They seemed to have done well with the Kevin Hart pick too, finding someone who satisfied the diversity demand and is actually somewhat talented. That just got that much harder.

Of course there’ll always be lesser artists dying for the job. Via Steve Sailer, here’s my pick. Go long, Academy:

  Notice how miserable the audience of women (all outfitted to meet the demands of the thirsty male gaze, I’ll add) look until that priceless finish when a young woman sees herself on a monitor (or something). Behind her another claps without enthusiasm, as grim-faced as her delighted friend was a moment before, before being distracted (by her own image, maybe) and falling out of character.
We are fated to navigate between the feminine extremes of inconsolable resentment and unquenchable vanity represented here:

If the revolution won’t be led by the sexually frustrated perhaps it will be led by the comedically frustrated.

Transgression’s Transition

Seems to me the term, once so beloved and useful to leftist critics, “transgressive art”, has nearly vanished in the Current Year.

A quick Google ngram search shows the phrase was unheard of before the sixties, emerged from complete obscurity in the eighties and rapidly entered the lexicon in the decade of leftist consolidation of the universities and the rise of pc, the nineties.

And after rescuing us from Mom and apple pie, it went away. The bottom falls out in the oughts.

In its early guise through the eighties it was more literal, including its application to art that wasn’t overtly political or that might even be hostile to leftist sensibilities. John Waters described himself in his early years making transgressive films as an anti-hippie. Punk rock and style was transgression, but wherever a band wasn’t overtly political it felt more fascist than anything else, a rejection of pacifistic,liberal rock and black pop. Whatever the case, it was far too white to ever be allowed to happen now, thank God.

Of course you never heard the phrase until it was popularized by the left, and that spike in its usage also represents its capture–along with the concept of transgression in art–by the left. The meaning of both changed, to become contextual–transgression itself was the thing when there was an actual white patriarchy, but once the transgressors supplanted it, they restored the realm of the sacrosanct, replacing God, Family, Country with Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.

That which was transgressive is now that which cannot be transgressed.

Take for an excellent example Ru Paul’s description of his work as a “big fuck you to male-dominated culture”; it remains just that, only now it is respectable, unassailable and part of a broader transsexual movement that won’t stop until every last masculine male has been chased into the weeds.

We seem to be inexorably working our way to a world where the only thing you can mock is white men, and only for being white men. Via Steve Sailer I see the Columbia Spectator reporting on a student group evidencing the sort of confusion of which we an all expect much more, soon:

Saturday Night Live writer and comedian Nimesh Patel was pulled from the stage by event organizers after telling jokes that were criticized as racist and homophobic during his performance at cultureSHOCK: Reclaim, an event held by Columbia Asian American Alliance on Friday night.

Patel, 32, was the first Indian-American writer for SNL, and has since been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing. Patel has previously performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers and opened for comedians such as Chris Rock.

During the event, Patel’s performance featured commentary on his experience living in a diverse area of New York City—including a joke about a gay, black man in his neighborhood—which AAA officials deemed inappropriate. Patel joked that being gay cannot be a choice because “no one looks in the mirror and thinks, ‘this black thing is too easy, let me just add another thing to it.’”

About 30 minutes into Patel’s set, members of AAA interrupted the performance, denounced his jokes about racial identities and sexual orientation, and provided him with a few moments for closing remarks. Compared to his other jokes, ones specifically targeting sexual orientation audibly receive less laughter from the crowd.

Patel pushed back on the officials’ remarks, and said that while he stood in solidarity with Asian American identities, none of his remarks were offensive, and he was exposing the audience to ideas that would be found “in the real world.” Before he could finish, Patel’s microphone was cut from off-stage, and he proceeded to leave.

cultureSHOCK, an annual charity showcase featuring a fashion show, productions by various student groups and a famous performer, aims to provide a platform for Asian American artistic expression and breakthrough harmful stereotypes.

Plundering for Justice

We’re in the redress and appropriation phase of the civil rights movement, wherein the wealth and culture created by history’s putative monsters, white Americans, is being redistributed among non-whites.

The tenets of the post-religious dispensation are Equality and Diversity. Together they posit a natural order, lost to white supremacy, wherein material wealth and power are equally distributed among a peaceful, racially diverse population, and between men and women. If not for white racism and patriarchy this natural order would take hold and humanity would (will) be saved.

The left is so far gone now it’s suggesting this Utopia did in fact exist (Britain was always diverse, Beethoven was black, etc). It’s patent nonsense, but these tenets hold. We can fully expect leftist historical retconning like this in the future on behalf of transsexuals.

These tenets imply economic commandments: go forth and make right white pilferage of black (for one) American wealth. Thus we have an economic growth industry that can masquerade as social justice, as the clever and cynical (or delusional, doesn’t matter) are encouraged to create new ways to effect that transfer of wealth out of white hands.

Team Diversity is the global mafia, and everywhere the Narrative wants its cut, from film roles to the “resources” being denied blacks by selfish whites retreating to the suburbs–loot and pussy foremost, judging from our long sorry experience with integration.

Meanwhile non-whites seem to be divided between the cynical and those who genuinely believe the con–that they’re only taking what’s rightfully theirs somehow.

The lefty journalist and/or activist now is like a pirate granted sanction by the religious order to go forth and plunder. The hobbyists of what Steve Sailer calls the voluntary auxiliary thought police are akin to crusaders, promised absolution and crashing through the countryside leaving a wake of ruin behind.

As a game black civil rights is rigged, because we can’t consider black outcomes have any connection to black people. The extent of the ruin they inflict on the whole as a result of criminality and sloth becomes the measure of our guilt.

As there’s money in this game, this means black dysfunction is a cash cow. For a long time of course it’s been a way to extract wealth from the whole through social programs. Despite being large, this is a boring  business, akin to retail banking. The civil rights industry is moving into more creative revenue streams now.

The Washington Post, “How White Racism Destroys White Wealth”:

There are a lot of reasons that home prices tend to be lower in black neighborhoods than in white ones. Decades of racist policies put in place by governments and private companies — segregation, redlining, deed restrictions, exclusionary zoning, the deliberate hollowing out of urban cores — have had the net effect of eroding the quality of life in many majority-black neighborhoods nationwide.

As the authors of a new Brookings Institution-Gallup study note, Zillow data shows that the median listing price of a home in a majority-black neighborhood in a major metro area is around $184,000, while the median listing in a neighborhood where blacks make up less than 1 percent of the population stands at over $341,000. 

The violent ethnic cleansing of white urban America allowed blacks to take over some of the nation’s best real estate. That first great pillaging didn’t lead to Detroit becoming Wakanda, but becoming Detroit. Now we’re expected to pay at the other end for the fleecing.

Another way of looking at this is a measure of the extent blacks destroy real estate values. There is a cost, it just flips either way depending on whether or not you believe the Narrative. The real cost is likely huge, but we’ll never be allowed to consider it at this rate: the opportunity cost of losing major cities to black pogroms, necessitating the suburbs and still all manner of adjustment to accommodate black malice.

But the raiders aren’t letting up–they have the hard ground of religious sanction, the Narrative, under their feet.
They’re putting prices on stuff now:

They wanted to isolate the effects of racism alone — to peel off all the other explanatory variables until they could “detect how much racism depletes wealth from black homeowners,” as they put it. In the end, they were left with one number: $48,000. 

That’s the amount the average home in a majority-black neighborhood is undervalued, relative to an identical home in an identical all-white neighborhood once you properly adjust for all the other structural and neighborhood characteristics that could plausibly affect that number. That’s the “cost of racial bias,” as the authors put it, “amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses” accruing to black homeowners.

There was a bit in the old National Lampoon magazine about black reparations, wherein white America consents to reparations but then presents black America with a bill for charges against those reparations, tallying up everything from the Club auto theft device to penis enlargement operations.

Meanwhile, the authors of the “study”:

“If we can detect how much racism depletes wealth from black homeowners, we can begin to address bigotry principally by giving black homeowners and policymakers a target price for redress,”

Feeling down, black America? Call your doctor and ask about Reparations!

“Laws have changed, but the value of assets — buildings, schools, leadership, and land itself — are inextricably linked to the perceptions of black people. And those negative perceptions persist.”

The stones themselves are imbued with our racism.

Afinidad Nationalismo

Did AMLO just give Trump’s inaugural address, in Spanish?

 MEXICO CITY, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Veteran leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office as Mexican president on Saturday, vowing to see off a “rapacious” elite in a country struggling with corruption, chronic poverty and gang violence on the doorstep of the United States.
Backed by a gigantic Mexican flag, the 65-year-old took the oath of office in the lower house of Congress, pledging to bring about a “radical” rebirth of Mexico (“make America great again”) to overturn what he called a disastrous legacy of decades of “neo-liberal” governments.

“The government will no longer be a committee at the service of a rapacious minority,” said the new president, who is often nicknamed AMLO. Nor would the government, he said, be a “simple facilitator of pillaging, as it has been.”

Trump: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

Making 16 references to “neo-liberal” policies in his speech, he vowed to abolish the “regime” he said it had created…

“January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

Pena Nieto sat impassively two seats to the left of Lopez Obrador during the sustained attack on his economic legacy, at times touching his face, wiping his brow with his hand and taking occasional sips of water.

Our Los Pena Nietos:

Suicide Watch

The old joke Washington Post headline, “Meteor to Obliterate Earth, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” works because it’s a fair description of a well worn media template, getting more worn by the day in our Current Year of Salon-Vox-Slate thumb-suckers: “social effect x occurs, protected class(es) disproportionately affected”.

There’s always been an unacknowledged concomitant to this model–a once implicit now explicit stricture: there are no particular white concerns or needs, there is only “privilege”. Indeed, whites faring better than the norm on any given metric is always evidence of privilege, not agency or virtue. The joke could just as well have been “Meteor to Obliterate Earth,  Whites Least Affected”.

When researchers first started reporting evidence of rising mortality in white America they were pilloried for concerning themselves with white health. One common response to its mention (see Salon-Vox-Slate) is to note whites are still ahead of blacks and browns in wealth and health. If you buy into blank-slate notions you see this as a straight measure of “privilege”; if you buy into common sense you see this as the measure of ruin left in the nation.

Whites have lost the ability to see the crime in this because we’ve been stripped of the concept of “us” by the reigning cultural order. The dying off of white Americans is a direct result of the same culture that suppresses its notice, much less analysis or address as such. Like rising mortality in a wealthy society, this is without historical precedent, a people unable to see themselves as such–at least one not physically conquered.

The Wall Street Journal

Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.

Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.

Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.

“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”  

The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations… 

White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.

Black men continue to lead in mortality (suffered and dealt), ironically enough (and this is just my racist opinion) by living it up, via a thriving hip hop culture–which is part and parcel of the broader culture in which whites are not thriving.

Elite whites would do well to drop their hostility to white identity–just as declining morals infect a population by welling from the bottom up, so will their consequences.