I thought I had already expressed this, but let me try to be clearer. There are racial problems in this country, as in many countries, and they need to be addressed. There is no way to "win" that fight—it must be a dialogue and people must be convinced of the rightness of a thing. Asserting it and then attempting…

Blackface is the same as not casting black actors. Okay. Good luck with all that.

You know that Argentina is extremely white, right? Like, 83%+ of recent European extraction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

That's a completely different issue. Recasting characters as white and then having white people play them is a problem, but it is not blackface or yellowface, which is what this video is criticizing and positing as the source of the problem.

I know, right?

No, I saw that there are some recent examples, including the Michael Jackson casting, but let's not pretend like this is not essentially a thing of the past. There may be a useful dialogue to have about it, but scraping together a bunch of examples from before the Civil Rights movement and acting like they're part of…

Honestly I couldn't remember the name of that one patch of desert that like a bajillion low-budget Westerns were filmed on, so I picked the one I could remember. You're totally right though—Monument Valley and the real West was reserved for relatively high-budget fare, often with decent cameras to capture the scenic…

Still could. He's not dead yet.

That's the "but" to this montage. Most of the entries are from decades ago, some literally approaching a century. Yes, Hollywood had a benighted past. Yes, it still has problems. But the fact that a non-Arab was cast in the Thief of Baghdad ninety years ago or in The Sheik ninety-five years ago has nothing to do…

Honest to god I remembered it as Kristin Wiig. God that movie fucking sucked.

Oh sure, shit from the 1920s is still relevant. Okay.

How is he a semite? He's not even Jewish. He predates Abraham. He's definitely fictional, and in the fiction he's the 10th generation of humanity. Per the book, all humanity is descended from him. If you want to square it with what we actually know—out of Africa and all that—I guess to keep the metaphor…

Billie Holiday had to "black up" at some clubs where the (white) patrons expected her to be darker.

That's interesting, my sole exposure to it has been from BDS types.

The Khazar theory was all about anti-Zionism. It was an attempt to rebut the Zionist argument that the Jews had a superior ancestral claim to the land of Israel. I don't recall clearly its origin, but at this point basically everyone who still claims to see any legitimacy to it is doing so because it lines up with…

White washing is terrible, but a huge percentage of these are from fifty plus years ago and/or are biblical figures for whom race is really not relevant or ascertainable. Moses almost certainly didn't look like Heston, but we don't really know what he looked like. Noah is completely fictional, so I don't get him as…

My recollection is it's about 60/40 on average in the Ashkenazi population. I'm not sure how that split is determined, but there's some kind of genetic marker that can be used to make the estimate. Some papers have been written on this in response to the whole Khazar theory.

I mean, if you're measuring it against the heyday of Westerns, I guess. But they were making them like pornography back then, with similar production values. I'll take a True Grit (Coens) or Django Unchained or Unforgiven once every 18 months over 140 hastily plotted oaters shot in the same couple of acres of…

I'm going to need a motionless 80 second shot of his impassive face before I believe that.

No, it was that one where the Danish auteur cleansed himself of the horrid feeling of having made a movie that people enjoy. Kristen Wiig almost ruined it for him, but with that script and direction he really pulled it off in a huge way.