Race prospective from America to France and the lefts culture clash

[Agema]

By all means invest in one's own film industry. Question is, should countries follow China's lead, and restrict the number of foreign films?

The UK sort of tried that after WW2. Hollywood embargoed the UK, and it even blew up to a wider diplomatic wrangle between the USA and UK. It was actually even worse: indirectly for reasons not important to go into it also ended up crippling the British film industry for years. But of course, part of the issue was the UK was heavily dependent on the USA at the time. One way or another, the strong will tend to use their power to their benefit.

China restricts and censors for obvious reasons that it wants to carefully control what its people have access to. But it's not just that: China is now a huge film market. There is therefore a huge premium for a film that can be allowed into Chinese cinemas, which will cause studios to compete for access, and to follow China's rules on acceptability - thereby of course also meaning these films go out to the rest of the world "China-friendly" as well. Alternatively, a film that ticks certain boxes can be called a Chinese movie (Chinese investment, actors, locations, some rules on what is acceptable), which again is leveraged to China's geopolitical benefit. Thus China can acquire substantial Hollywood influence so that Hollywood does China's work, by manipulating Hollywood's drive for profits.

Also, as for 101 Dalmations, is a shift in location really that much of an issue?

It wasn't shifted in location - I'd have preferred it if it had been. It was set in the UK, but a thoroughly Americanised vision of it. I find that somewhat irritating.

 

[Cheetodust]

The UK sort of tried that after WW2. Hollywood embargoed the UK, and it even blew up to a wider diplomatic wrangle between the USA and UK. It was actually even worse: indirectly for reasons not important to go into it also ended up crippling the British film industry for years. But of course, part of the issue was the UK was heavily dependent on the USA at the time. One way or another, the strong will tend to use their power to their benefit.

China restricts and censors for obvious reasons that it wants to carefully control what its people have access to. But it's not just that: China is now a huge film market. There is therefore a huge premium for a film that can be allowed into Chinese cinemas, which will cause studios to compete for access, and to follow China's rules on acceptability - thereby of course also meaning these films go out to the rest of the world "China-friendly" as well. Alternatively, a film that ticks certain boxes can be called a Chinese movie (Chinese investment, actors, locations, some rules on what is acceptable), which again is leveraged to China's geopolitical benefit. Thus China can acquire substantial Hollywood influence so that Hollywood does China's work, by manipulating Hollywood's drive for profits.



It wasn't shifted in location - I'd have preferred it if it had been. It was set in the UK, but a thoroughly Americanised vision of it. I find that somewhat irritating.

You should watch the Barrytown trilogy. The first was an american production and makes 1980's ireland look like a third world warzone. The next two were far more reflective of what ireland actually looked like, if maybe a little idealised.

 

[McElroy]

I had the great 'pleasure' of finding a Nazi sticker at a bus stop in my neighbourhood (which I ripped off in case you're wondering).

That's how they get you.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

This is growing into a wider topic I didn't really expect so let go

Why restrict this to the left?

Because that's what kind of interested me the most. American left a political spirit is dominated by racial issues because America has racist problems. but seeing it wasn't as big of a deal and other left-leaning parties around the world kind of interesting.

This is arguably a problem in Sweden, where both sides of the political spectrum were quick to adopt BLM and anti-BLM rhetoric in the weeks after it started in the USA. And while Sweden has problems with racism still and occasionally with cop brutality, it is nowhere near the level of the USA so it all becomes silly when various pundits try to make it seem as if Sweden has a police force hunting down black people for sport or as if Swedish police needs to be allowed more leeway in using violence, when they rarely have to escalate beyond holds today.

I'm pretty sure Sweden doesn't really have that many black people but I do know about the Sami and Romani (who get shit on in all of Europe). one Infamous example was when the Police had a database on all Romani.

Police database of Roma stirs outrage in Sweden

Swedish police have established a database of Roma, the force said on Monday, confirming a newspaper report that a government minister condemned as "unethical, unacceptable and illegal".

www.reuters.com

While you can't make a one-to-one parallel you can argue racism in the police force could be a problem in Sweden as well

(also I've opened up a can of worms by mentioning Romani to Europeans)

Same problem in Australia. Trump has given legitimacy to the right (and to the incompetent), and activists are protesting about problems they see on TV without considering if they're the same here.

I do find it weird very nationalistic American leader who only cares about the US would inspire many foreign leaders to also be jerks. I am sorry we unleashed this plague upon you

 

[Agema]

You should watch the Barrytown trilogy. The first was an american production and makes 1980's ireland look like a third world warzone. The next two were far more reflective of what ireland actually looked like, if maybe a little idealised.

Not dissimilar to the movie version of England, which consists of two areas and two types of people: London and the Home Counties, populated by poshos speaking RP and working class Cockneys. There are occasional hints that other cities, counties and accents may exist.

 

[Seanchaidh]

The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.

President Macron is basically warmed over Bill Clinton. Maybe check that import from the US.

Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.

The young people are correct.

 

[Satinavian]

The article was an interesting read and I suggest you look at it. Considering there's a lot of Europeans on here I would like to get their perspective on this mainly on the difference between European and American left.

I generally agree. This taking over American political ideas is annoying and contraproductive.

Now Europe does have racism as well. But not the same kind of racism or racism-related problems. For example in most European countries there is no significant black minority. Importing all those white-black rethoric does not work well and measuring diversity in how well black people are represented fails even more. OTOH all those white people don't really identify as "white" as such, most minorities are white and most racism is white on white.

If all of that was not yet confusing enough, most of Europe never had this stupid drop-of-blood rule and people of mixed descent are considered "mixed" or if there is a clear majority of the ethnicies of ancestors, that person is considered being of that ethnicy.

Now France does have a lot of post-colonial baggage and minorities coming from there. That is not actually that typical for Europe.
....
There are also similar things with sexism etc. Gender roles and expectations do differ across the ocean. To just port things over is not always a good idea. Now there are also strong differences between European countries and even regions so it might not be that obvious all the time.

For example in Germany MeToo basically got one long retired film director and then fizzled out due to lack of allegations.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[Dwarvenhobble]

Why restrict this to the left?

The power of US culture is enormous, and I can't say I'm particularly happy about the erosion of my country's independent national character in any aspect, becoming homogenised and increasingly subsumed into US culture. It's not that I dislike the USA, I just think there's a lot to cherish about our own. In the political sphere, I think there is a genuine concern that by dumbly importing US political arguments, we start thinking about our country's problems in the context of a different country with different circumstances, traditions, laws.

I mean we got some of it because "Stop Trump 2020" the Political PAC or funding group decided to target the UK for some reason possibly as a way to raise more funds from gullible activists. It's them that created the infamous list of the UK's "Racist statues" that included the one of Ghandi among others.

I have a similar feeling about BLM in Britain. Not that I think black people don't face discrimination - especially from the police, and there is certainly evidence to support black people dying in police custody proportionally more than whites in the UK. I just think that as a copycat movement so heavily borrowing from the USA it doesn't have an organic engagement with British society.

Remember the shitshow that was the BLM climate protests where they concreted themselves to the road in front of an airport and then some of them tried to superglue themselves to planes?

Yes, there are limits to what you can do. I don't see the point in banning anything, but I think a country can certainly consider vigorously investing in its own culture. The UK used to have a film industry, once. Now its film industry is making movies for Hollywood. And what we get from Hollywood in return is, well. I enjoyed the animated 101 Dalmatians as a child. I saw the live action remake about 20 years back, still faithfully set in the UK, but for some inexplicable reason now with skunks and raccoons. Because in Disney's vision of the universality of human experience, everywhere is the USA.

I think cultural appropriation is a valid concept - just not in 95% of the cases the claim is made. I don't care about white people with cornrows or Grimes wearing a kimono, but I think there are clearly instances where people have done some deeply disrespectful things.



I might be mixing something up here, but if I remember rightly UK BLM ended up trying to disrupt an airport to protest black people being at greater risk of respiratory pollution. Quite likely they are. But I can't help but feel that is the manufactured stunt of activists who really do not have the pulse of the community.

I mean the UK still does have a film industry. It's just Pinewood is being used mostly by US studios now because of the state of the art upgrades it had done to it. Also the BBC and channel 4 still fund movies.

Blue Story (the 2019 one that kept causing gang brawls in cinemas) was a BBC funded film.
Horrible Histories the movie
Stan and Ollie
Mindhorn


Film4 had a hand in Wild Rose
T2 Trainspotting.

 

[Satinavian]

Germany is also one of the countries in Europe that has the largest problems with gender pay gap, expectations on women as housekeepers

That is true mostly for western Germany. Eastern Germany does have the expectation that both are working and generally a far smaller gender pay gap which in quite a number of counties is even reversed (in the sense that men get less). In Germany the gender pay gap is also varying wildly with occupation. That makes it actually an interesting country to study where the gender pay gap actually comes from. But if you take total averages, well, western Germany has far more population and higher paying jobs which contribute more to the average.

Germany, by all accounts, seems to be in a similar situation where the sexual harassment and abuse exists but women aren't in a position where they feel comfortable speaking up.

Possible, but difficult to say. MeToo didn't get much opposition and was embraced by the media and lot of support but people generally were surprised how little came of it. There might be other explainaitions as well. Maybe the society is less stratified and huge power differences are less common ? Maybe the social security net does provide a better alternative to being pressured into sexual favors by superiors ? Maybe having legal prostitution takes some stigma out of sex for favors/ provides an easier, more accessable alternative ?

All this being a long winded way to say that "Europe" is a really bad label to use due to how different the countries are and because what seems obvious in Sweden might not be in Germany, France or Poland.

True.

 

[Hawki]

Be that the often negative effects of social media, proliferation of conspiracy theories or indeed cultural homogenization.

There's an argument to be made that cultural homogenization is a bad thing, but what do you do about that? Wall yourself off from the world?

Many European countries do have sizable black minorities, France and the UK chief among them

Black British form about 3% of the population. Is that really a "sizable minority?"

 

[Satinavian]

Black British form about 3% of the population. Is that really a "sizable minority?"

It is a lot for European standards. Germany for exapmle has one percent, Poland even less.

 

[Hawki]

It is a lot for European standards. Germany for exapmle has one percent, Poland even less.

By the standards of the continent, maybe, but in general?

I don't know what the exact percentage is for a "sizable minority," but it definitely isn't 3%.

 

[09philj]

By the standards of the continent, maybe, but in general?

I don't know what the exact percentage is for a "sizable minority," but it definitely isn't 3%.

Britain has very geographically inconsistent demography and population density. London's massive population and status as the capital gives it a disproportionate pull over how the country is perceived nationally. In London 13% of the population is black, and 13% of the entire UK population lives in London. Besides which, 3% of the UK population is quite a lot anyway; it's more people than live in, say, the Tyneside-Wearside metropolitan area, where I live. It is also slightly more people than live in Northern Ireland.

 

[stroopwafel]

Many European countries do have sizable black minorities, France and the UK chief among them but Spain, Italy and Sweden also have sizable minorities. I think the difference is that racism against black people is much less accepted in Europe (that's not to say that it doesn't exist, mind you) and seen as "real racism" which makes it less palatable. In Europe the main targets of racism these days are muslims in general and arabs in particular. This obviously exists in the US too, but the higher ratio of muslims and arabs in many European countries and the absence of the black/white tension in Europe means the dynamic is entirely different. That's not to diminish or downplay that Sweden has a real problem with people being racists against Somalians, but it is much more directed and less prevalent then the hate against muslims.

That's a bit of an oversimplification to downplay the role that the islamic faith plays in anti-muslim sentiments. In Europe in general there are very few hate crimes against ethnicity. But when you have a religion that is diametrically opposed against western values and in which name there is a constant wave of bloodbaths against random civilians then ofcourse people will not be standing with open arms. Muslims still have it good in Europe if you compare it to how christians are treated in islamic countries. Not to mention muslims themselves do anything that western liberties allow like segregating their children in their own schools. The anti-democratic lessons preached in mosques. Their views on gays, women or minorities in general. Sure, you could say those beliefs are not that different from orthodox christians(though the context definitely is) but the fact remains that islam is the only faith in Europe that is actually growing. If you combine the high birth rate of muslims with the declining birth rate of native Europeans and constant influx of muslim immigrants I don't think that anyone appreciating western values and liberties wouldn't find this worrisome.

 

[Agema]

I mean we got some of it because "Stop Trump 2020" the Political PAC or funding group decided to target the UK for some reason possibly as a way to raise more funds from gullible activists. It's them that created the infamous list of the UK's "Racist statues" that included the one of Ghandi among others.

Ah well, politics is globalised now. US action groups are well aware that drumming up support in other countries is useful. In order to break down the international order, encourage other countries to break down the international order, too; in order to encoruage your view of the world even back in your own country, encourage other countries towards your view. For instance, the existence of another country with heavy gun control and a socialised health service serves as an example to your own that they are viable policies, and a bunch of people in the global voice who will say so. Thus the war can be fought by defaming and even undermining those policies in that other country, and diminishing the voices of their supporters.

I mean the UK still does have a film industry.

And it's kind of shite. Your average British film (that's not a Hollywood offshoot) has very little vision and is really an extended TV production, in both feel and production values. I mean, I quite enjoyed Mindhorn, but would anyone have lost anything if it were a TV miniseries? Similarly the low ambitions of TV spinoffs like The Inbetweeners and Horrible Histories does tell us a certain something.

There's James Bond, and thre are a few people like Danny Boyle, Ben Wheatley and others with some vision and verve to make things in the UK that really merit being movies, and perhaps who prefer to be away from the dead hand of Hollywood studio interference. There's some really good stuff - I saw Saint Maud last year and it's superb. But mostly the UK is churning out stuff that has little business needing a cinema to be seen and that hardly anyone outside the UK wants to watch. The French did a much better job with their film industry, and I generally think you'll find much more movie-making artistry in their national output than the UK's.

 

[Hawki]

Ah well, politics is globalised now. US action groups are well aware that drumming up support in other countries is useful. In order to break down the international order, encourage other countries to break down the international order, too; in order to encoruage your view of the world even back in your own country, encourage other countries towards your view. For instance, the existence of another country with heavy gun control and a socialised health service serves as an example to your own that they are viable policies, and a bunch of people in the global voice who will say so. Thus the war can be fought by defaming and even undermining those policies in that other country, and diminishing the voices of their supporters.

I think there's some truth to that, but who's encouraging who to break down the international order? Certainly not the US - the US is in a dominant position of the international order. If anyone's breaking down the international order, it's China. That's not mentioning regional powers, but it occurred to me that while US culture is arguably globalized, China's accelerating its presence there as well. We can see this in stuff to pursuing the Chinese box office in films, where, to list personal examples, there's certain areas in Sydney where you can find billboards and other signs written exclusively in Mandarin. Like, not Chinese script along with English, exclusively Chinese.

This isn't bad or good in of itself, but it's definitely a sign of changing times.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[stroopwafel]

For the non-Europeans: This is how the increasing hate crimes against and growing intolerance of Muslims in Europe gets justified. This and the bunk science of the Demographic Bomb that will precipitate Europe becoming a Dhimmi State under an international Caliphate run by Saudi Arabia.

That's a very disingenious attempt to silence any discussion about the actual destabilizing effects that large groups of muslim immigrants have on European society that have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

My take is this: Yes, we have a problem with alienation of Muslims in Western Europe, as they are often found in the lower socioeconomic strata with poor education and low paying jobs (if any). There has been an influx of Muslims in the last two decades, ever since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and particularly after the Arab Spring in 2011, that has caused these groups to swell and Europe was very unprepared for the influx of immigrants. But this is not a chicken or egg situation, it is a situation in which poor people have been consistently targeted as scapegoats for the last two decades due to their religion, as a way for what is now the alt right (in Europe also known as the far right) to have a handy explanation as to why things are going bad. This creates a loop in which Muslims are isolated from the rest of society and gets increasingly isolated due to preconceptions and racism, which in turn makes them band closer together and thus get even more isolated. Yes, there are increasing signs of radicalization among young Muslims in the poor suburbs of pretty much all Western European cities, but we should also note that the same people that radicalize also run a much higher risk of joining organized crime. This suggests that it is not religion itself that is the driving factor, but rather a terrible social situation. The solution to this problem is not to blame Muslims for their own woes, but to orchestrate increased integration measures to ensure that young, malleable Muslims have more meaningful things in their lives then nutjob Imams that think ISIS is the hottest thing since the Sun.

This is almost laughably naive. It is actually the European welfare state that allowed muslims to segregate themselves, much more so than in the U.S. Housing subsidies and priority indications, islamic school subsidies, welfare programs, education. All of this goes disproportionally to immigrants.Their thanks? Spit in the countries face with terrorist attacks, violent crime and anti-democratic hate speech. I find it espescially surprising that someone who considers herself a 'hardcore feminist' thinks there is nothing with a religion where women possibly couldn't be more submissive. Or if their anti-democratic beliefs and misguided superiority complex in the face of western values isn't exemplary of much of their problems. But no, let's not hold muslims themselves responsible but instead excuse their behavior by putting the blame on western society as usual. Muslims aren't the oppressed class from some dated, bygone era. Their problems are of their own making. The exact same reasons that impedes social and economic progress in their native muslim countries.

Because god damn have I met a ton of Swedish Muslims in my life and the vast majority of them have been well integrated or trying their hardest to conform to Swedish social norms. I've even had Muslims married into my family and they were a far cry from Wahhabist nut jobs.

Good for you then. There is a muslim at the night store I frequent. Really nice bloke. I don't see what that has to do with anything. The problem is almost never with individuals you meet. The problems arise when thousands turn to hundreds of thousands to millions.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

That's a very disingenious attempt to silence any discussion about the actual destabilizing effects that large groups of muslims have on European society that have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.



This is almost laughably naive. It is actually the European welfare state that allowed muslims to segregate themselves, much more so than in the U.S. Housing subsidies and priority indications, welfare programs, education. All of this goes disproportionally to immigrants.Their thanks? Spit in the countries face with terrorist attacks, violent crime and anti-democratic hate speech. I find it espescially surprising that someone who considers herself a 'hardcore feminist' thinks there is nothing with a religion where women possibly couldn't be more submissive. Or if their anti-democratic beliefs and misguided superiority complex in the face of western values isn't exemplary of much of their problems. But no, let's not hold muslims themselves responsible but instead excuse their behavior by putting the blame on western society as usual. Muslims aren't the oppressed class from some dated, bygone era. Their problems are of their own making. The exact same reasons that impedes social and economic progress in their native muslim countries.



Good for you then. There is a muslim at the night store I frequent. Really nice bloke. I don't see what that has to do with anything. The problem is almost never with individuals you meet. The problems arise when thousands turn to hundreds of thousands to millions.

I, too, like to demonized diverse communities with harmful blanket statements born from the rancid arses of the most paranoid right wing pundits.