Bowdlerized

I graze a bit on NPR, mostly to find material. Let’s just say it’s a “target rich environment”.

The network has a couple of shows – chock full of vaguely-black sounding accents and topics, slathered over the same progressivized-for-your-protection content they provide the other 162 hours a week, shows like “It’s Been a Minute” and “The Takeaway”, that seem to try to address, not so much the “black” audience, but NPR’s huge, relentlessly white progressive audience, apparently to make them feel, if not “more authentic”, at least a little less guilty.

But I’m here to bring the guilt back.

In recent months, I’ve heard 2-3 shows on the relentlessly woke networks – interviewing the stars of the movie “The Woman King”, an “afrocentric feminist” story about a sub-Saharan kingdom’s unit of female warriors.

The movie – and the gushy, smarmy, self-congratulatory interviews – gabble and prate on and on about female power and empowerment and inspiration and enough word salad to unstop a cement colon.

What doesn’t get mentioned? The real life “warrior women’s” main military and economic justification; procuring slaves to sell. They were a revenue-generation tool for the Dahomey monarchy.

Go ahead. Tell me where the slavery talk is. I’ll wait.

National Review’s Armond White – one of modern media’s most intellectually consistent and rigorous film critics, and incidentally a black man – was not amused:

Historical fraudulence is a problem, but the reasons behind it are what cause alarm. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello gainsay Dahomey’s role in the slave trade, trivializing the complications of that original sin. Instead, they offer another Millennial gender-flip, conceived to further sexual confusion via racial frustration and feminist anger.

This approach cannot be taken seriously because, like Black Panther and The Lion King, The Woman King is juvenile. The film’s comic-book premise treats black audiences like children. That adolescent kick over hair-pulling catfights is extended into an almost laughable, pseudo-political history lesson pitting women against men…Thus, she gives us Dahomey as Wakanda, a made-up history for uninformed viewers who feel so “unseen” that they can be robbed and conned again.

But let’s not bury the lede here.

NPR, and Hollywood.

Erasing Slavery.

It’d be so cool if NPR engaged with the proles. I’ve got so many questions.

19 thoughts on “Bowdlerized

  1. There is something vaguely schizophrenic about Progressives’ portrayals of history.
    It’s a bit like your uncle and his war stories, but everyone knows that he spent the war stationed at Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway New Jersey.
    With maybe the difference that your uncle doesn’t believe his own lies.

  2. I just had to look this up..

    From Wikipedia:

    Both domestic slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were important to the economy of Dahomey. Men, women, and children captured by Dahomey in wars and slave raids were sold to European slave traders in exchange for various goods such as rifles, gunpowder, textiles, cowry shells, and alcohol. Dahomey used magical rituals for slave trading. Prior to being sold to Europeans, slaves were forced to march in circles around the “Tree of Forgetfulness” so they would lose memories of their culture, family, and homeland.[53][page needed] The purpose of this ritual was to prevent the spirits of deceased slaves from returning and seeking revenge against the royalty of Dahomey

    So why did Dahomey go into decline?

    Why, it was the mean colonial Brits who forced them to quite capturing and selling slaves.

  3. In real life the “female warriors” were formally married to the king of Dahomey so they were treated like royal wives, no hanky-panky.
    This really is the tale of women having their lives co-opted by the patriarchy.

  4. The Woman King story was written by Maria Bello, a collapsing beauty of limited talent and intelligence who firmly believes that she is the little white girl who can tell the true story of the black experience – of course NPR loves her, they always love the white saviors and the noble work they do on behalf of black people.

  5. It’s completely off topic, but before I read this post, I was reading a very interesting article on fictional Dyson Spheres, and how recent advances with Graphene make building one theoretically feasible if our technology ever progresses enough to have the engineering to do it.

    That led down a rabbit hole to carbon nanotubes and nano technology as it exists today. It was all very inspiring

    And then I looked up that chimp out video.

    Now I’m hoping a comet hits Earth.

  6. Dyson Spheres – I don’t like them. Can’t see the stars.

    imagine a candle with a 50-foot loop of ribbon around it

    but the candle is a star and the ring the world to live on

  7. Dyson spheres or Ringworlds are not stable over the billions of years it takes to develop intelligent life.
    That is why we live on a planet and not the surface Dyson Sphere or a Ringworld.
    For more than a billion years the Earth has provided an environment stable enough to host life while being dynamic enough to promote the advancement of living forms. A billion years is long time.
    Imagine that there is a flat plain, and that plain is somehow disturbed from beneath so that, despite erosion by rain and ice and wind, it is being pushed up by a foot every thousand years.
    After ten million years you have a ten thousand foot tall mountain range.
    Now imagine that whatever force was forcing the mountain range to rise goes away, so that every thousand years your mountain range shrinks by one foot.
    After ten million years you would be back to a flat plain again.
    A billion years is long enough for fifty such ranges to emerge, grow, and be eroded back to a plain.
    That is stability.

  8. The primary purpose of a Dyson Sphere is energy collection. Lebensraum is a side benefit.

    The solid sphere that Bigman deplores is the least likely form it would take, as a complete sphere would not orbit a host star, thus could not take advantage of centrifugal force to maintain it’s distance….also it would blot out any light people living on the outer surface might need.

    Rather, according to today’s Science™ it would most likely be an array of orbiting ribbons, consisting of individual satellites. Graphene comes into play due to it’s extremely low mass, high conductivity and light gathering features.

    It is interesting in that astronomers take the plausibility seriously enough to have looked at solar systems with RF unusually skewed towards the infrared, which they believe might reveal the presence of a Dyson Sphere.

  9. I’m kind of exasperated, here. But I am used to it.
    If you want near infinite kilowatts of energy, we know how to do that with breeder reactors.
    If you want a biosphere that will survive an asteroid impact or a nuclear war, build underground or under the sea. Both are cheaper than a Mars colony.
    I keep imagining those plucky Mars colonists, decades or a century from now, watching a thermonuclear war on Earth through their telescopes and congratulating themselves on escaping the apocalypse — until they see a few hundred missiles leave earth orbit aimed towards them.
    Once you can put a satellite in geosync orbit, about 24,000 miles up, it just takes a little push, a few more kilograms of fuel, to send it into an elliptical orbit crossing the orbit of another planet at some point. That’s how the Indians (dot not feather) managed a Mars observer. It’s just a matter of timing your little push so that your sun orbiting probe crosses the orbital path of Mars while Mars is actually there.
    Back in the 80s the Indians decided that it would be cheaper to link the country together with satellite comms rather than physical telephone line infrastructure so they went hard into rocketry & comms satellites. Eventually they launched geo sync satellites to tie the country together. Then ISRA decided that it just took a little more money to build a Mars probe than it did to build & launch a geo sync satellite. And off they went.

  10. The sun releases energy at a rate of 384.6 septillion watts/sec.

    The Earth receives a continual 174 Petawatts (10 x10^15 watts).

    I don’t have the info to calculate the energy available from the Earth’s stock of fissable material, but I doubt it comes close.

    If we survive to be a star faring species, we need to bring the lightening.

  11. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 01.11.23 : The Other McCain

  12. I don’t know UMMP. I’m thinking that if there is some way to get most of the libidiots to colonize Mars, we could avoid the nuclear war. After all, it’s Pedo Pete and his WEF masters that want one. Of course, as I believe I have speculated on this forum before, if we send a ship there to bring more people and/or supplies after a couple of years, the original colony will probably have killed each other.

  13. bad news, you guys. there will be three ships sent to colonize mars. you are on the second ship, the ones with the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.

  14. Maybe before planning Dyson Spheres we should figure out how to get back to the moon first?
    What happens to a Dyson Sphere when it is hit by a Kuiper Belt comet every few years?

  15. bosshoss429 on January 12, 2023 at 6:08 am said:
    . . .
    Of course, as I believe I have speculated on this forum before, if we send a ship there to bring more people and/or supplies after a couple of years, the original colony will probably have killed each other.

    But that idea is based on historical experience, and we ignore that these days.
    Forward!
    I believe that the American & European experience of settling the New World is being projected on the idea of solar system and extra solar system exploration and exploitation.
    Space ain’t like that, not at all. Sticking people on ships and sending them there made sense in the 15th-19th century. Space ain’t like that, not at all. You aren’t going to open a hot dog stand on Mars, like Ray Bradbury imagined. You aren’t going to get there in a reimagined 1930s era naval destroyer, as Heinlein imagined.
    And BTW I will put my nerd credentials up against anyone’s. You want an essay on the similarities between Christ and Severian the Torturer in Gene Wolf’s _Book of the New Sun_ trilogy? Fine. Give me a few hours. When I was a teen I hung out at Uncle Hugo’s in its original location, down at Franklin and 4th. Bring it on.

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