Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Authorial Affirmative Action: Even the Politically Incorrect Rarely Engage on More than a Single Aspect

One of the things that is rather amazing about authorial affirmative action is how pervasive it is, even among artists who are pretty transgressive against Cathedral hegemony relative to their peers.

For instance, the movie Idiocracy (opening scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8 )
opens with a demonstration of the massive delta in fertility between the smart and the stupid.

The smart couple, Trevor, IQ 138 and Carol, IQ 141 basically have no descendants.

Do you see the authorial affirmative action, even in this least PC movie made in recent memory?

Here it is:  First of all, women in the 2-3 sigma range are substantially rarer than men.  So it is much more likely that the IQs are reversed, even ignoring hypergamy.  Second, women in the 2-3 sigma IQ range are VERY hypergamous on IQ, because it is almost invariably a huge component of their identity.  We discussed this back a few months ago.  Simply put, a woman in that category will almost never accept a mate who isn't smarter than she is, by an amount sufficient for her ego to accept that fact.  Been there, married that.  So you see a concession to feminism practically right in the opening credits.
Then you see the IQ 84 couple, which are OF COURSE, not black or Hispanic, despite this being fairly probable (50% of the black population is there or below, about 15-16% of the white population is---given the relative ratios of the population in the US, you'd expect randomly selected such couples to be black or Hispanic around half the time).  No, they had to be fat rednecks for authorial affirmative action purposes (although the fat part requires no affirmative action, most people in that IQ range in the US are obese.

You see much the same sort of authorial affirmative action in the 'Unincorporated Man' series-in particular, the 'Unincorporated Woman' being in fact, a woman.  Given her nature and capabilities, the probability that she is a she is damned near zero.  Amusingly, you could rewrite her character to be a man with next to no effort, leading me to conclude that it is blatant authorial AA.  It's also easy to ignore if you want to enjoy the story and its exploration of a lot of ideas. The series to date is well worth the read.  But whenever a good author writes a character of a protected class and you could divest them of that status with a trivial rewrite (it isn't load bearing in the characterization), it's authorial AA at work.

Perhaps it is a reluctance to fight a war on more than one front?  Unfortunately, what you're facing isn't so much multiple possible fronts, against powers that would otherwise not be at war with you simultaneously, but more akin to multiple army groups loosely coordinated all on the same front against you.  You can't assume that the other groups aren't going to counterattack you if you leave them alone while you're dealing with your primary target.  If you're an outlaw conservative or reactionary anyway, best to give not even a pinch of incense to the Cathedral.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even with the all the PC nodes the movie gave: Black president, showing mostly dumb rednecks, black girl friend, ect it wasn't shown in very many theaters. Fox effectively buried the movie till it came out on DVD. Even the slightest implication that the cathedrals program is a long term disaster is enough to get your film almost killed in Hollywood. If you went full rogue you'd never work in that town again.

The only truly subversive film I've seen in the last 10 years was District 9. The movie ripped up the whole everyone is equal meme and made progressives think it was a movie about white racism at the same time. Now that was a wonderful rip job.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho said...

Good observation, I had already noted too that rarely do actions against leftist liberalism engage on more than 1 aspect. What is missing is clearly the whole picture that the entire liberalism is wrong and that it needs to be discharted completely, which is something that most people don't realize.

The failure to throw liberalism completely in the trash bin has a pretty obvious reason too: People don't see any other alternative and acceptable comprehensive ideology.

The basic alternatives to liberalism are:

*Authoritarian Socialism -> Like Hugo Chaves & China. Some people actualy adhere to this alternative.
*Islamism -> Pretty alien to westerns
*Fascism -> Fascism is constantly bombarded by the big media & hollywood to make sure that people won't consider it as an alternative solution.
*Living in a isolated community, like the Amish -> Has obvious severe practical problems, like needing to leave your job to work on agriculture.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho said...

And I further expanded a little bit more on the topic in my blog: http://felipemonteirodecarvalho.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-do-reactions-against-liberalism.html