Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

It's like that for every President isn't it? I curse FDR's ponzi scheme when I look at how worthless my social security checks are going to be while I pay thousands upon thousands of dollars while the government keeps raising the income limit yearly so I keep paying more and more. WWII saved FDR's ass, not his schemes. I know many Boomers feel differently, but they are the ones collecting good money right. Future generations and I will be left with scraps, maybe even nothing as it goes insolvent. This is what eventually happens to all ponzi schemes. Yet he's probably top 5 on the greatests list.

P.S. It wasn't only Raygun, no one took AIDS seriously back then; well except Walter Mondale and Diane Feinstein. I lived through that time in the SF Bay Area and remember it well. I can seriously recall private conversations with very liberal Democratic-voting all-in-on-civil-rights and affirmative-action friends going along the lines of this: "AIDS is overblown - it's the gay people making a big deal about this." Not my words, but I was shocked this came from my most left-leaning friend*.

Also, my teachers (unions) hated RR just as much for firing en mass the striking air traffic controllers. Which is really the context of my point. Raygun had many many detractors over his presidency, but over time people he did a good job overall. There's actually of contingent of older pot-smoking Ronald Raygun liberals in parts of El Lay.

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*Then I again looking back, I shouldn't be. Progressives in El Lay / Hollywood / California are two-faced. I've heard all sorts from rich white people in Calabasas:

My friend said his mom won't let him date black people.
Did you ask your friend if his mom would let him date Asian people? Does his mom think Asians are subhuman too?​

-or- this for the win:

Someone's wife asked me if you married me for a Greencard.
Did you ask her if she married her husband for the money?
​

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I mean, it does it surprise us that it's super "progressive" Disney that sets up black-guy Finn as a possible romance with Rey, only to give him an yellow girlfriend, and then finally settle on giving him a black girlfriend? Miscegenation ya know. These white writers are probably the same people who spew how Chappelle is the harbinger of hate against Asians, Jews, and LGBT.

 

He's a great writer and I loved his show on Netflix. When I was in the hospital a few years ago, holes in my lungs, not able to eat anything, all I did was watch his show and imagine I could eat all those delicious dishes around the world. RIP Anthony Bourdain.

 

Let me put it this way: the audience doesn't give two shits about wokeness when the writing and direction are good because the audience gets absorbed into the story.

But when the writing is shit, the characters are shit, the actors are shit, the direction is shit, the actors are ugly, and there's only wokeness remaining, and keeping in mind 90%+ of people aren't really all that woke, then the wokeness becomes like screeching on a chalkboard. I tried giving it a chance, my kids fell off at the beginning of the third season, and my wife (who claims to be conservative but always votes Democrat because she doesn't identify with the stodgy image of the GOP) now says "what is this (woke) shit?"

It's like what I say: please don't, don't add a random Asian character for wokeness if the character sucks or isn't going to do anything. At least South Park got it right when they named their black character Token. They knew they already had too many characters and probably wouldn't have time to properly develop one, so they named the kid Token.

Getting back to Discovery and another reason why I hate it. Who the f**k is this random Asian guy on the starship Discovery? Discovery has gone on a few more seasons than TOS, and I still don't know this random Asian guy's name or what the f**k he does on the ship, Why bother? Sulu got 100 times better treatment from NBC / Roddenberry back in the 60s!



He reminds me of my Asian friends in high school who were pushed to be get good grades, got really good grades, and made it into Starfleet (MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford), and probably graduated at the top of his class, and now ended up as a perma no-name Ensign at the most advanced ship with the fleet (SpaceX, Google, Microsoft). Seriously, the writers should just name him Ensign Token.

Seriously, does anyone know this character's name, rank, function, or of a memorable swashbuckling moment (no cheating and looking up on the Internet).

 

Not aggression. Sure, some comedians are about aggression, but I don't find them funny at all.

There's an art to it. It's about building tension and then releasing it. I love Chappelle's bits about Asians or Chinese. It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable when he starts, he builds that tension, then releases it at the right time, making everyone laugh. I think that dude is hilarious. The really good ones will push the limits. Sometimes they will fail and bomb! But the only way to get better at the craft is the bomb on occasion. (Chappelle's "Space Jew" joke was kind of bomb - audience and my reaction.) The thing is, people get upset because there's often an element of truth or a painful realization of the truth is with jokes. Gotta push those limits. Provocation is one aspect of comedy. If you don't want provocation, there's Jay Leno or Jimmy Falloon. If you like understated physical comedy, there's John Ritter or Dick Van Dyke (as Rob Petrie).

With respect to inconvenient truths, this is what happened during one my son's assignments in class.

Oh dad, we had an assignment in school where were making advertising plans for a business.
What was your business?
A buffet, a restaurant.
Is it because we've been going to the buffets, Golden Corral and Hibachi Grill?
Yeah. But someone in the class borrowed my idea and came up with a plan for "Ching Chong Buffet"
​

Full stop. The entire car, my wife, kids, everyone bursts into laughter and could not stop. It's a little bit disturbing in this day and age, but it's hilarious because of this!

Did the teacher do anything?
Yeah, the teacher told him it was racist.
​

Sigh of relief.

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Chappelle in his latest show starts off with a bit about seeing his brothers beating up Asians on the street, looking seriously disturbed. He then switches the topic to coronavirus pandemic, saying that he never felt ill, stretching things out for bit, finally ending with the punchline: "I couldn't help but feel like - when I saw these brothers beating these Asians up, it's probably what's happening inside of my body."

I thought that was joke hilarious! That every time I read that bit, I laugh a little bit. If other Asians are offended by this, then I'm sorry. Don't watch Chappelle because he's going to push.

Hey, but super sensitive people are making a big deal out of this. Oh, he's advocating violence against Asians! Or he's excusing bad behavior on the part of blacks because of their historical suffering. Um, no he's not - and it's comedy.

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That Eddie Murphy bit on SNL where he pulls down the pants of a Michael Jackson doll that supposed to be "anatomically correct" and exclaims: "Ah hah! Just as I suspected" before imitating Jackon's voice: "Beat it, beat it!.

And this was on network TV! Eddie Murphy would have been so cancelled today because of that!

 

I'm all for full spectrum representation, but it's what @ColtMrFire says, it's gotten really bad to the point of ridiculousness. I'm in the biz and I keep my mouth shut.

The idea behind this is to encourage and get people who have traditionally not been on the inside of the industry a chance. Not go 100% meritocratic, but 85% meritocratic. Give that underrepresented writer, grip, camera operator the job even they are only 80-90% as good as the established ones. The idea is that over the longer term, we build something that that is truly representative of the population. (The problem IMO is that they are probably giving the jobs to people who are 50-60%, who are not good enough).

I didn't understand this when I was younger. In university, I knew many a classmate who were let into impacted engineering programs through affirmative action, only to be "weeded out". Why bother was I thinking? I realized later that the reason is that not all get weeded out. A few will make it through, thereby setting a foundation for future engineers. Well, that doesn't matter anyway because we import our engineers from other countries now (and for some time). Even though this was the late 80s, whenever my friends and I saw too many foreign students (usually a grad student who needed to cover a underclassmen course or two) on the first day of class, we immediately dropped it for that quarter (everything was graded on a curve).

Today, my daughter has expressed no interest to going to any of the California UCs. "Too many Asians". She wants to go to a school which is more representative of the country. Other Asians, programmed on "success", hate me for being OK on affirmative action type programs for schools.

Anyway, the problem with show business is that it's for profit a business (very much Ferengi like - where did you think the ST:TNG writers got the idea of Ferengi from?), not academia where there's more leeway for social engineering. As I said in the other thread, the wokeness will go away because the bottom line will dictate what happens. There's more competition than ever and the studios are going for each others' jugulars - noting that Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are now force to be reckoned with by the old school movie studios. My money is not going to all of the streaming providers! I bet yours isn't either. And keep in mind that NBC/U and Sony haven't even gotten out of the gate yet!

The irony of course is how this industry was largely built by outsiders, American Jews, who were locked out of most everything else.