Hollywood’s Struggles with Wokeness

Michael Shellenberger's article at Public. "We Are Only Now Starting To Recover From The Madness

Its political power has broken, but Wokeism is still ruining the culture."  Excerpt:

“Complete intolerance became almost a religion,” wrote [actress Justine] Bateman, “and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others.”

Hollywood is not only one of the most status-obsessed neighborhoods in the world, it is also one of the most Woke. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Pictures mandated racial quotas. CBS required that 50% of its writers’ rooms be non-white. And a culture of fear of saying the wrong thing spread.

“This was the era of trying to exercise control over those who dd not want to follow the crowd,” wrote Bateman, “and has their own ideas about what they needed to do.”

At this point, Bateman circles back to the demands of the SAG actors union, which protested studios efforts to replace them with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“This dampened our culture and innovation, bringing people to even think that generative #AI, a regurgitation of the past, was actually our cultural future. When you starve a society of those called to be independent thinkers and cultural and intellectual innovators, you rob that society of any forward movement.”

What Bateman is saying is that Wokeism had so destroyed cultural innovation in Hollywood that many of its leaders, executives, and creative geniuses had become resigned to AI taking over the role of real humans.

Bateman isn’t alone in her assessment. “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” the writer and director of HBO’s “The White Lotus” told fellow Gen Xers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik of The Free Press.  “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma.”

Bateman put her finger on the essential status-obsessed nature of Wokeism, which had been taken up most vigorously by Millennials but enabled by the “Me” generation of Baby Boomer liberals.

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California Judge Allows Case to Proceed Against Social Media Company for Addicting Children

From Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., TikTok Inc., and Google LLC can’t invoke the First Amendment or the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230—a decades-old legal shield for online services—to block allegations that they designed their platforms to addict young people causing depression and anxiety, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl ruled in an 89-page order.

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Whence “Liberals”?

I abhor Donald Trump. I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I considered myself to be "liberal" until what seems to be the majority of liberals who I know turned pro-censorship, war-friendly, trusting of the FBI & CIA, abandoning the working class in most things except rhetoric, willing to applaud authoritarian measures during COVID & clueless that they were being played by the corporate media on numerous major issues including Russiagate. The majority of these people wouldn't recognize themselves if they time-traveled to meet themselves from ten years ago. For several years I have considered myself to be politically homeless.

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Robert Corn-Revere Takes a Nuanced Look at the Trial Court Injunction in Missouri v Biden

At Reason, Robert Corn-Revere discusses the recent trial court ruling of Missouri v Biden. An excerpt from Corn-Revere's analysis:

One thing is clear about Missouri v. Biden: The decision cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens. Bullying tactics by government officials violate the First Amendment regardless of who controls the levers of power. Accordingly, it is not a huge victory for the right as some have imagined, or a loss for the left, as others fear.

Assuming it is upheld on appeal, as it should be, it will limit the ability of future administrations to engage in behind-the-scenes censorship. And that is true whether the administration is led by Biden, Trump, or someone else.

Corn-Revere's analysis is excellent and nuanced.

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Parents Pushing Back Against Smart Phones as Devices that Enable Social Contagion and Emotional Damage

Parents are pushing back against smartphones for their children, as described by Olivia Reingold, in "The Parents Saying No to Smartphones in her article at The Free Press: ‘How you help them learn to be present, in a task or with a relationship, is one of the top challenges of our generation. Part of that is going to be saying no.

Nicholas Kardaras specializes in treating young adults aged 17 to 25 with screen addictions at the Omega Recovery treatment center in Austin, Texas. Kardaras says the first hurdle is often convincing patients they’re actually addicted.

“They don’t realize that they have a problem even though they’re on their device for 18 hours a day and flunking out of school because most addicts don’t see their addiction as a problem when they’re in the middle of it,” he tells me.

Kardaras says his patients are often convinced they’re dealing with other issues, like Tourette syndrome or borderline personality disorder, which they’re introduced to through “psychiatrically unwell influencers” on social media.

He said he knows these patients are actually suffering from “social contagion” instead, because the treatment—forbidding access to cell phones and the internet for a short period of time—is usually the cure, which “shouldn’t really happen with genuine borderline personality disorder or genuine gender dysphoria.”

Paradoxically, Kardaras says that almost all of his young patients were raised by “helicopter parents,” many of whom did their best to keep their kids away from smartphones or heavily monitored their internet use.

“A lot of the young people I’ve worked with will say, ‘I don't feel a sense of control in my life,’ ” he says. “They feel like they’re being smothered and being told what to do all the time. But if they take out their phone, and maybe go on a gaming platform, then they feel like they’re conquering fantasy worlds. They feel a sense of empowerment and control.”

The above article links to Ronald Riggio's 2022 article on social contagion: "Social Contagion: How Others Secretly Control Your Behavior: We are often unaware of how others can influence us." Here's an excerpt:

Social contagion is the subtle and sometimes unwitting spread of emotions or behaviors from one individual to others.

Emotional contagion is the spread of emotions through crowds and is the reason why a movie seems funnier if we are in a crowded theater as opposed to watching it alone–our mood is influenced by those laughing around us. The same process would cause a stampeding wave of fear if someone were to suddenly yell “Fire!” in the crowded theater.

A study by Friedman and Riggio (1981) found that emotionally expressive individuals–persons who displayed high instances of nonverbal cues of emotion (primarily facial expressions)–were able to “infect” the emotions/moods of others in the room without any verbal interaction. Subsequent research found that certain individuals are more prone to emotional contagion processes (Doherty, 1997).

Reggio's article did not specifically mention transgender ideology, but he does provide a taxonomy of social contagion includes: "Deliberate Self-Harm. Such as “epidemics” of self-cutting, eating disorders, and suicides." Consider also Abigail Shrier's writings on transgender ideology and social contagion, for which she was viciously attack, even though transgender ideology would clearly be a prime candidate for social contagion.

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