A while back I posted about my plan to dump my TV subscription. One obvious reason for cutting the cord, probably the one most cited by surveys, is the expense. Americans are seeing their TV bills jump every year averaging something close to $150 per month in some areas. There’s simply no way to justify it so people are cutting the cord and relying on services like Hulu and Netflix.
Another reason, I suspect, is cultural. The great upheavals we are seeing in politics across the West are over a common divide. On one side are people who wish to maintain their traditions and customs. They embrace material advances, but they also embrace the cultural heritage that has made those advances possible. For us, the past is not a foreign country. It is our country.
On the other side are the people who hate everything about the present, seeing it as an impediment to their quest for the glorious future. The past that produced this horrible present is a nightmare from which they can never awake, which is why they seek to smash it all to bits. Tradition is their cage and they want out, even if that means destroying themselves and everyone else in the process.
Watch American television for any length of time and you can’t help noticing the proselytizing in favor of the wrecking ball. I turned on the NFL yesterday and it was endless chatter about the wonderfulness of Cam Newton, the Carolina Panther QB. Despite being a mediocre player, his team is undefeated, due entirely to its defense. But Cam is black so he must be hoisted onto our shoulders and paraded around as a hero.
What’s galling about this nonsense is people, who know better, play along because they fear losing their career if they are not sufficiently enthusiastic. Instead of pointing out that Newton is just not screwing up as much as usual, but is otherwise mediocre, they lay on the praise as only a fearful supplicant can do. Sporting events have been turned into preaching moments and I’m sick of it.
Having had enough of the preaching, I wheeled around the dial thinking I should see if there is anything I’ll miss when I drop TV. I saw a commercial for a show called Supergirl. The 30 second ad made clear it was aimed at people with the IQ of a goldfish. It also made clear that it was just more proselytizing. We are endlessly barraged with agit-prop telling us how wonderful 20-something white women are at everything and how hard it is for them because of the Pale Penis People.
I can probably ignore that nonsense, but you can’t even see a decent movie because they keep insisting on making Vagina Power movies like the Hunger Games and now Star Wars. Yep, Star Wars will now make the hero a gal who defies the laws of physics by beating up all the men. It is one thing to suspend disbelief but being asked to accept an 80-pound girl throwing around a 250-pound man without the use of magic is a bridge too far.
What I find intolerable about this trend is not that the female is the action hero. It’s that all the men are now pussies. According to our cultural overlords, the ideal white man is a bisexual wimp who is led around by the nose. I’ll grant that foppishness is more common today, especially with the young, but that’s a result of the Progressive kulturkampf. Television is not a reflection of the culture, it’s the whip used on the culture.
I think what has put me over the edge is the new habit of ad makers to feature mixed race couples. I guess they think every white man in America dreams of bringing a black man home to the old lady. They never feature a white guy and a black woman. It’s always a black guy and a white woman and it is most certainly on purpose.
The most egregious example is the Audi ad where the old white man is puttering around the house listening to the weatherman telling him the storm is shutting down all the roads. The visual tells us he is waiting for his family, but the storm means he will be left alone to eat cat food. Then the family bursts in because their Audis let them brave the snowstorm and see grandpa.
It looks great until we see that the grandkids are black and the son-in-law is the reason. The message they are sending could only be clearer if the son-in-law was speaking a foreign tongue. Audi is telling all the old Pale Penis People out there that their day is done. If they want to have a peaceful death, they better lie back and accept it.
Yesterday, I saw an ad where a couple, black man and white woman of course, is camping with their kids. One kid is black and one is white. Maybe this is supposed to be the new Brady Bunch. Maybe the ad makers are unfamiliar with the basics of biology. Then again, the howling at the moon lunatics producing this stuff think biology is a social construct. What matters, the only thing that matters to them, is the message.
It’s not the mixed race stuff that bugs me. It is the ham-fisted proselytizing that sends me over the edge. At least make the kids look like the product of a mixed race marriage. If they were honestly trying to sell their vision of the future, I could at least pretend it is negotiable. But that’s the point they are trying to make. It’s not negotiable and you better get used to it.
That’s really what has done it for me, I guess. The people in charge are so smug, so arrogant, they don’t even try to make their case anymore. It’s just a non-stop blaring of the megaphones. In North Korea they have a PA speaker in the center of every village, screaming out propaganda. In America, we have installed these things in our homes. It turns out that the hippies were partially right. It’s time to drop out.
They will miss me more than I’ll miss them, now and in the glorious future they imagine without me.
First I turned off the network news shows. Then I ended HBO and all sports broadcasting (sports are the opiate of the masses). I have turned off cable news and any network shows having commercials. Turner Classic Movies is the only channel worth paying for. (Pining for America as it used to be). If only I could have it without buying the 200 stations of blather.
The Expedia commercials are some of the worst. The white guy husband is a clueless, ugly shitlib dweeb with this brave, independent, money-savvy wife that leads him around by the nose, talks down to him and always knows better.
They have another one where a young Asian chick in a bank taking on another ugly dweeb (white, of course) over her credit score. Naturally, she comes out as knowing soooo much more than the bank guy. It closes with her being carried on a lounge chair, Roman style, out of the bank by some guys (naturally, one is black) in glorious style, once again proving wymmymz rock the world.
Expedia has a huge ad budget for these. They are on *all* the channels *all* the time.
Fuck that.
I’m trying to figure out who at the advertising agencies and teevee networks is in charge of assigning the distribution of mixed race or same sex couples and black people in positions of authority.
Are there memos regularly distributed about this?
Do these orders come down from the Davos, Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove get togethers?
Or are the producers so reliably acculturated to this utopian diversity and cultural marxism that it happens all on its own?
We had some friends over a while back and I made the mistake of turning the channel to “Modern Family”. Within about thirty seconds, I hated every single character on the show.
I’m cutting the cord come Jan 1.
I’m trying to figure out who at the advertising agencies and teevee networks is in charge of assigning the distribution of mixed race or same sex couples and black people in positions of authority…….
Sycophantic college “educated” young women who are signalling to their billionaire bosses that they aren’t like their prole parents – they are indeed enlightened and ready to do anything necessary to please the elite. A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
Me, twenty five years ago…..
“TV subscription?”
Oh, yeah, that’s where you don’t get any commercials like on regular free TV.
Of COURSE you need to “rent” special equipment, why do you ask?
Taxed…TAXED? The Dickens you say….!
Don’t be silly, they CAN’T “monitor” what you’re interested in!
Now, about the “convenience” of game consoles, like …say…X Box, when you just want to unplug from the matrix……
Seven years and counting with no retard picture box. You will kick yourself for not having done it sooner.
What caused me to cut the cord was the the way dads are treated in children shows and commercials. Everyone is an idiot who wouldn’t be able to dress or feed himself if not for his patient wife or intelligent children. Even when the father is a comic book style super-genius, or a professional they are still treated like moron. As a father of four boys they, and I, deserve better than that.
I had AFN in Germany from 2004-2011, and when I returned to the States I figured I didn’t need to pay for cable. I did buy a screen for the DVD player. I see a little TV when I visit my daughter, but they mostly watch Netflix of Hulu or re-runs of sitcoms. I guess I never do see any commercials; what I’m reading here is pretty eye-opening.
I do know that I can’t even watch movies form the 80s or 90s any more – too Proggy; all I see is the preaching. Pull the plug Z.
I “tuned out” when the Discover Channel started using CGI to fake its dinosaurs.
(Anyone else notice the recycled Jurassic Park renders used in the T-Rex and Velociraptor episodes? I’m paying for paleontological documentaries created by dogged film crews and devoted bone-hounds, but I’m getting cut-rate, candy-colored digital chyme republished from a digital studio in LA instead.).
But, banishing the TV’s at home is just a first step. My son learned about “twerking” and “Miley Cyrus” at his secondary school. And he got it from associating with the kids in his classes, not from the TV. So, obviously, any comprehensive assault on the Left’s kultur-kampf would need to deny urban pop-culture a foot-hold in our state schools.
But, can government schools “kill their TV-sets?” That is, can they turn away the CNN “Science” clips about Global Warming, Al Gore’s cut-price movie and companion “study-guides,” and Zinn-like deconstruct-ive “documentaries” that underpin academia’s decades-old narratives about the Vietnam War (to choose just one example)?
My take is, from the university on down to the grade schools, academe is media is academe, and that this equation makes it increasingly difficult for earnest reformers to discern the two anymore. This confusion provides a convenient redoubt from which the agenda-driven media/academe hybrid can lob rounds at the Dominant Culture, safely and deniably.
Why are Conservative media critics like, say, Victor Davis Hanson,(one of my favorite chroniclers of California’s self-imposed disasters) so blinded to this? Here’s a hint: Were it not for this blind spot, media-hounds’d have to lump MSNBC’s rantings on racism and ESPN’s “commentary” on tattoos with their tax-payer-funded uni’s credentials for Environmental Sciences and their own non-profit alma mater’s divers mailings, appeals and rewards. In other words, they’ve been captured by their own credentials. Or Hoisted on their Own Petards.
“The people in charge are so smug, so arrogant, they don’t even try to make their case anymore. It’s just a non-stop blaring of the megaphones.”
Well,…. you know, NYT, and New Yorker, Magazines AGREE.
The Emperor’s New Clothes are ALL the rage!
Not seeing avatars this morning, but very much approving your essay. I have been ranting about the mixed race, oh-so-PC commercials, and the not very subtle aggrandizement of the Cam Newtons (even I, the football amateur, have been underwhelmed by his performances) and the other football players who behave like jungle bunnies on the field. One recently did a little victory dance that we have seen a chimp do, I kid you not.
The mixed race, mixed gender, when-do-they-marry-their-dog? commercials are nauseating and insulting. If I were on the other side of the divide, I wouldn’t like them either. In commercials showing groups, I find myself saying “they forgot the Asian” or “they forgot the Latino”…
It appears now that the luxury cars are all owned by blacks, so I will cease lusting after one. How liberating is that? They’re even taking Cialis, though we’d been lead to believe they’d never need that.
Time for some coffee and a primal scream…
Thank you for what you do here every day. And for hearing what we have to say.
Yeah, have to laugh at the Left trying so hard! My way to fight it is as it has been for years, is to turn the sound off while semi-watching any sport and by semi-watching, I mean with book in hand, reading something meaningful. Replay will show you the good stuff anyway.
People who need the “sports fix” and want to mostly avoid the lefty/prog crap, should focus on college sports where there are still a modicum of motivated, try-hard white kids competing. Though I have to laugh at the SEC: In olden days it was the SEC’s scrawny, but quick white boys versus the ponderous negroes from the Big 10 factory states. Nowadays, a typical SEC team is 90-95% negroid, while their bands and cheerleaders remain 95% white! Too funny!
The Food channels have tried to use the “black” meme but you can only show so many programs on BBQ, chitlins, fried chicken and collard greens. Guy Fieri remains a hoot even if he runs crappy restaurants.
How about these stupid (too clever by half) avatars you have on this comment board, insulting, drawn by 20 somethings that were told by art teachers how quirky inventiveness was their thing.
The black/white, female/male dominance thing is horrid and so prevalent. The adverts all show a barely competent, awkward, male, balding and chubby paired with an attractive female with trendy kids rolling their eyes at the out of step and marginal Father figure. Years ago I saw the movie “Jurassic Park” I hated it. A total female dominated movie, not for me.
Ha. Until just now, I never knew I had avatars. I approve comments, but I don’t see the avatars.
A black man camping? I would believe the biological implausibility of the individually raced children before that.
You missed the soup commercial with the two homo dads and the Star Wars tie-in.
They are literally spoon-feeding the message to the public, “Unless you like and buy our product – you hate homosexuals”. It was dreamt up by some committee of dickheads and nobody dare criticise it.
TV is trash – it is there to confuse and humiliate you so that you find relief in the commercials. Switch it off and go camping.
A black man’s idea of “camping” is parking his ass on a worn-out, thrown-out couch on the street, amongst the trash in the middle of the ‘hood, where he can smoke a doobie in semi-comfort, while de chilluns watch out for the cops! Just watch a few episodes of “The Wire” to get a real feel for black culture; its fascinating in a way, almost as good as a trip to the zoo.
Why watch “The Wire”? That is scripted. Watch Judge Judy or COPS for some real-life folk doing real-life stupidity and you will get a decent sense of where your welfare dollars are going.
The meme of the badass girl has taken me out of many a movie and Sci-fi novel. I just don’t buy it and once I stop accepting the nonsense, the whole thing falls apart.
My show right now comes from a most surprising place – the BBC. Having read all of Bernard Cornwell’s “Last Kingdom” books, I was glad to see that they didn’t screw up the series adaptation too badly yet. Uthred has not been beaten up by any women yet at least.
I’m a geezer, but not in bad shape for a geezer. For a geezer man. I can still bench my weight and squat twice my weight. I can pass the Marine Corp Physical Fitness test for 17-26 year old males, despite the fact I barely remember those years it has been so long. Something like 90% of female recruits cannot pass those standards.
I can accept a tough lesbian chick using magic or weapons to defeat the bad guys. Watching some pixie in Lycra kung fu a 250 pound man just makes me laugh and ruins the movie.
Former Marine too. Knees are too gone to run 3 miles – the rest I can still do easily. And the presses, and squats when the knees are cooperating… Never saw a female Marine who wanted to try hiking with the men on a forced march – even without a rucksack.
Maybe I’ve had too reality to buy into the meme.
Last night on a local BBC news program (that’s the BBC which without fail drools over everything leftoid and destructive, and for good reason is called the Biased Bullsh*t Chatter) reported a ‘news’ item lamenting the fact that the theatre in our part of the world ‘was not diverse enough’. Shock horror as we poor saps who are obliged by law to pay for this crap — or face jail — were told that most major theatres had few non-white staff and indeed there was one established playhouse who had only two percent of its staff being of diverse ethnic origin.
The presenter of this non-news item informed the gullible that now the only ambition of these theatre companies is not to appear on this list again. The tone was one of shame that they were on it in the first place. Oh, woe is us! However he did of course fail to mention that most of the arts in the UK is already lefty and female run.
I might have thought the tradition of theatre meant their ambition was to put on good plays with fine acting, but apparently I am wrong.
I noted the names of these prestigious, if local, theatre companies and thought I must go there more often. There are some things I do not need to see shoved down my throat: I know I can’t get away from it on TV but until now, there was a chance I could go to see things done properly rather than for political box-ticking and the satisfaction of the diversity fuhrers.
Yes I and my wife got off of satellite several years ago, and haven’t looked back. It costs too much and paying for 200 + channels we never watched anyway, made no sense. We just use a regular cable, internet modem, and chromcast, and thats it. Works great. All those ridiculous commercials showing black and other people doing things they never really do, are mostly avoided. All this silly propaganda isnt fooling anyone anyway, its just causing eye rolling from the couch. Mixed black white race families are rather rare, have always been rather rare, and all the propaganda the media can muster won’t change that. Sports channels like ESPN are about to soon crash, because of over charging, and too much politics. People watch sports to GET AWAY from politics for crying out loud. The propaganda wont work anyway, because it is trying to affect things like mating, which have biological roots. The Left is trying too hard, and becoming silly and pushy. And yea, all the SuperWomen roles are getting silly.
At risk of sounding like an infomercial I just purchased a TV-B-Gone keychain fob.
It has exactly one button and all it does is turn off TVs. Havent owned a TV in nearly 20 years now, but just out and about with the kids I noticed how much of the garbage you have to absorb in public places.
Now I discreetly turn it off whenever we’re subjected to it.
Oh, and good point about the outrageous cost of TV cable now. I’m 56, so for years I operated on the assumptions about TV that I’d learned as a youngster. Basically, it was pretty much like a utility when I was a kid, and reasonably priced. Less than $20/mo; like your basic telephone, if you didn’t make long distance calls. I’m not even aware of when the price began creeping up, and by how much, but in 2013 I finally realized we were paying $140/mo for cable. Yes, we had HD channels, but the only one I enjoyed watching was the Golf Channel. Most of the time, we had the Weather Channel on!
The breaking point for me came when we had to have some work done on a wall, and I needed to disconnect the cables and move the TV across the room so the workman could do his job. Then I moved everything back. It wasn’t until a week later that I discovered I couldn’t turn on the TV because I’d forgotten to plug it in. An entire week, and I hadn’t noticed the TV wasn’t on! At that point I figured we could save the $1000+ a year and spend it on dvds instead.
I stopped watching TV when I was 14. I tried to get back into pro football in the early 90s but since that coincided with the era of taunting and using the other guy in the dog pile’s helmet to push yourself up with, that only lasted a couple of weekends.
In retrospect, it was the Norman Lear sitcoms that did it for me. They were so damn preachy and manipulative. I guess I just didn’t appreciate big Norm and his writers trying to get in my head.
@fodderwing
They’re talking to the tween and teenage white girls who will go through the rest of their lives with queers and black men imprinted in their minds as the acme of masculine intellect, common sense, and restraint. Women want to believe what everybody else believes, not what’s true.
Do it, Z, cut the cord – you won’t regret it. I did 2 years ago now. At the time, I felt almost scared – like I was turning my back on my tribe, or something. But nothing happened – I didn’t miss anything, not even the news. Now I hear radio ads for some upcoming new show or new season, and I feel almost embarrassed for the people who are actually watching this pap.
People protest that they HAVE to have TV to watch their sports. As you’re discovering, even something as simple as that has been polluted by propaganda. You can’t watch a game without having to sit through a propaganda session about the courage of the first homo halfback, or the first transgender golfer, or the loving same-sex partner of the curling captain, etc.
The point is, they will never leave you alone. Not even for the length of time it takes to hit a ball across a field. That, too, is now their territory, and you have no choice about it. And the ads, yeah, those are obvious, too. Besides the mixed-race couples, there are also the idyllic all-black families: clean-cut professional dad, stunning mom, and two bright-eyed top-of-the-class kids. All drinking orange juice or eating cereal together. When I remember the rates of black illegitimacy and family breakdown, I snark to myself, “Yeah, how frequently does THIS scenario occur?” Normal all-white family, Dad, Mom and kids? They’re kinda rare in commercials now. There’s always got to be some twist, some gimmick – normal is ugly now.
If I had any writing ability I would do a daily blog showing examples on how television commercials are slanted toward the left wing progressive viewpoint.
I think you are right, as this year the mixed-marriage messaging has been over the top. Audi, Wal-Mart, Cheetos. One wonders who is actually behind this as it seems there are still some smart people on Madison Avenue. Smart people would understand that Americans self segregate in many ways (disparate tastes in churches, movies, certain sports) and marriage being one of the big ways (97% of marriages are same-race) the ad-men are attempting to make a tiny demographic appear large. Unless they are certain that there is not a larger demographic disapproving of mixed-race marriage, the corporations paying for these ads are creating more negative vibes for their brand than positive ones.
Not only do the commercials suck, you pay the same rate to watch them as the programming, which pretty much also sucks.
We cut the cord ten years ago and never missed it. Once and a while when traveling we will turn on TV in a hotel room and it reminds us in two minutes why we got rid of cable.
The worst is to be waiting at an airport gate, unable to avoid the sound of CNN.
Football is hilarious. The camera catches the play, and then the antics of the player…….every play is the same. Its like it’s understood there are two components. We must watch the dance, or the fist, or the bump every single play…..Its the same on the highlight reels too.
According to tv ads, everybody – black, white, asian – all live in beautiful brick homes in the suburbs. the black people are all in charge. everybody sounds like a white person though. oh yeah – black guys love brats, evidently. i also learned that the marine corps is made up of women and black people and their primary job is passing out food around the world. it’s like an alternate universe.
“What I find intolerable about this trend is not that the female is the action hero. It’s that all the men are now pussies. According to our cultural overlords, the ideal white man is a bisexual wimp who is led around by the nose.”
It is awful. Try to find a TV show with strong, active male leads, and women who offer emotional support– it’s impossible. Watching 120lb women beat up 200lb men is getting absurd, it’s a constant drumbeat. Canadian TV seems to be the worst; there are a couple of otherwise enjoyable Canadian sci-fi shows I have been watching (“Dark Matter” and “Orphan Black”) that feature women as completely dominating men along every dimension: physically, emotionally, intellectually, leadership skills, etc. Propaganda so thick you can cut it with a knife.