"You're Killing Me, Smalls!"

Frequent comment AB Prosper offers the following, in comments to Off The Cuff:

To the topic at hand I'd say your latent Civ Nat is out its cage again.

Hollywood for good or ill however disproportionately Jewish at the top and sometimes the cultural differences can be very grating especially when they are unconscious or concealed. The funny thing there , openly Jewish movies like the Princess Bride or TV like the O. C. with a Jewish lawyer as a lead no less can be really great.

I might broadly disagree with more than a few of your points,

A: is just wrong I'm afraid, saying "pass" on movies and TV just means you are just as entertained doing something else, probably cheaper. You lose nothing

B: I can't speak to this and while its true enough for the Marvel movies I did see, I simply don't like them for the most part , caveat Logan and do not wish to watch them. I saw the remake of Death Wish though and it was decent

C:True but there is little good culture in Hollywood

D: I think not, Few people can remember movies from the 60's and 70's and they made a lot of good ones. The medium will also die faster than books and I suspect in a hundred years or so, none of them will be remembered and the medium dead. Books will go on and on though only some will be remembered

E: So? Its a dead nation now and the medium that it created can go with it for all I care.

F: Not our jobs to spread our values and its folly to do so in this age as we can see from the actions of people in charge have spent decades doing just that and fucking everything up. American values as seen in the Constitution and all that barely work for us and won't work for anyone else anyway. They were meant for a very specific people and a very specific time and didn't survive industrialization or the first European immigration wave

G: Too late for the most part I think though its will be tempered by the fact most moves going forward have to be international and get past Chinese and Indian censors as the market there combined is like 8x that of the US . The only way around that is for the Right to build its own infrastructure with things like what Vox Day is doing and for us to support them

I also strikingly doubt Hollywood is promulgating by message of nationalism for all and to each people its own culture traditions and ways . A few movies do promote Americanism but that isn't my ideology at all.

That said your last point about culture is spot on.

Broadly though, its not bad to simply avoid media and find something better to do with you time than watch TV or waste ,money at the movies, YMM as they say very

Once again, we remonstrate, not with AB, but with the unvoiced thousands his response represents:

A. That's just gainsaying. And books vs. movies is a false dilemma. Neither need exclude the other.
By not going, you lose the most important, visible, and influential cultural medium, in return for nothing. No one is saying sit in the cinema 24/7/365. But going to the few good flicks every year is as inconsequential as voting. Ask our current president if voting matters. Then ask the criminal shrew he defeated.

B. It's a free country, but the underlying point remains, and actions (as well as inactions) have consequences. See A and H.

C. All the more reason to support the few pearls there are.

D. Last week's box office, for any value from 1925-present, shows that's not so.
If you're depending on the apocalypse to wipe out the medium, that becomes a self-fulfilling curse. Plays have been around for 3000 years; but now, we see them digitally for the most part. And the worst-produced TV show you ever saw was better than the best local theatre you'll ever get. It's just the nature of the beast.

E. See D, above. Cultural nihilism is a poor excuse for ennui.

F. Another self-fulfilling curse. It's exactly your job to fertilize the ground, till the soil, and plant the trees, both culturally and actually, for the next generation and beyond, even if you'll never sit in their shade nor eat their fruit. You've let the civilizational poisoners do that for 50+ years; how's your current everyday going now after that monumental error starting probably before you were born?
People who won't man the pumps of civilization deserve to be adrift at sea without hope when the boat sinks, but for the millions they'll condemn to a similar fate through laziness and indifference they deserve to die a thousand deaths. And they're going to get both.

G. The market in China and India is a fraction of the US market and always will be; it's about dollars, not bodies. They aren't paying $10-15@ there to see flicks, and in China, they simply steal them outright for nothing. This is why Hollyweird is nailing itself into its own coffin. Americans won't see 95% of their tripe, and the Chinese won't pay for what they make, even the good stuff, but they'll happily bootleg it and laugh about that.
For reference, this Avengers movie was already pirated in China before I saw it, at midday on the day it nominally opened.

You get the culture you build and nurture, and that's what gets you the civilization amidst which you (and generations yet unborn) will live.
TANSTAAFL.
Anyone cheering pulling down the Parthenon and burning Notre Dame is a Visigoth, no matter how they dress it up.

Anyone who can't find $10 once in a blue moon to see a good flick is sure as hell not going to man the barricades and put their own life on the line when a cultural conflagration opens up in earnest. It's like saying I won't pay for a seawall now, but come the day, I'll take a sandbag down to the shore to stop the tsunami.

And not doing the easy things to wait for the hard things instead is, as noted, myopic and self-defeating.

I don't care if no one wants to see this particular pic.
I don't care if you see it via DVD/BD/streaming service, in the comfort of your home theatre lashup.
But someone who won't see any flick, ever, is cutting his own throat.
And a lot of other peoples'.
For no valid reasons, but just a plethora of excuses.

This flick grossed $357M, just here in the US, in 3 days.
That means they had an audience of 36M people for 3 hours, sitting there, and absorbing messages willingly, in rapt attention.
And 2-5 times that overseas, not counting the ones who watched it pirated for nothing.
$1.2 billion. $1,200,000,000.
And that's only in the first 3 days.
In a week this movie could buy and sell Donald Trump. In a year, you could add Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, and dozens of lesser lights.
And half that audience is young, impressionable kids.

There isn't a producer in Hollywood anywhere, movies, TV, or commercials, who wouldn't kill his mother and yours and all their children but himself for a fraction of that audience, since 1900.

There isn't a president or candidate for the office going back to George Washington who's every had that kind of audience turnout. Not one.

Now, anyone, tell me why it's a waste of time and doesn't matter.
Anybody, call that kind of clout - financial, rhetorical, and cultural, combined - "just a comic book movie". (If you do, you're an absolute moron.)

People not getting this obvious common sense without being beaten over the head with a cluebat is why we're where we are right now, and why a cultural war is about to become a civil one, with all the trimmings.

POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM FROM CULTURE.
Write it on the blackboard 10,000 times, until it penetrates your skull.

Andrew Breitbart shouted that from the rooftops, and still people don't get it.
People are setting their own houses on fire, and crapping in their own wells, and wondering why things aren't looking very rosy.

Nothing personal, and that's not aimed just at the original commenter.
But it's inarguably the way it is, and why.

And I'll drive the point home yet again with another flick moment of cultural history: