Why there are fewer female speaking roles

Over at Feministe, a couple days ago Jill posted (without comment) part of an article from the LA Times, which says that despite making up half the population, only 29.9% of movie speaking roles are (at least in the top 100 grossing films of 2007). The reason was pretty obvious to me: most of the bad guys in movies are men. While the good guys usually consist of men and women, most villains are male, almost all of their lieutenants are male, and virtually every mook/guard/redshirt is male.

Avatar is an example of this. While there were male and female protagonists, all of the antagonists at every level were male.

JJ Abram's Star Trek is another example. In Starfleet (the good guys), there were both men and women present - on the USS Kelvin, at Starfleet Academy, and on the USS Enterprise. Indeed, it looked like the producers and casting directors had gone out of their way to make the crews seem half-male, half-female.

The villainous Romulans, in contrast, were all male. Lucia Rijker (known for playing a boxer in Million Dollar Baby was supposed to play a female Romulan, but I didn't see her. Anyways, there was no way it could have been accidental that the good guys were mixed male-female and the bad guys all male.

Now, if the good guys are male and female and the bad guys are male, it follows that there will be more men with speaking roles than women. Of course, if films started showing more "bad girls," feminists would probably complain that the film industry is "promoting violence against women."

Eating Out with SWPLs

The tail end of The Asian of Reason's post in which he describes social class at pizza buffets reminded me of the adventures I've had eating out with my SWPL friends. With my normal friends, eating out is a simple task. We go to a place that has good, filling food, is relatively cheap, and is close by. Sometimes we go to a fast food burger joint like Wendy's or McDonald's, other times a sit-down restaurant, and sometimes hole-in-the-walls (on a side note, I love hole-in-the-wall restaurants). Deciding where to go is a simple task, since we aren't very picky.

With my SWPL friends, it's the opposite. They have an aversion to typical fast food places like McDonald's, considering them too "greasy." They are correct about fast food being greasy, but anywhere you go, a burger will have fat in it, which makes it greasy, and anywhere you go, French fries will be fried in oil. One place they are fond of is Chipotle, which specializes in burritos the size of bricks, crammed with meat, cheese, rice, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, beans, and salsa. That can't be too much healthier than a Baconator. They also are fond of sandwich shops, probably because of the "fresh" and unfried ingredients.

Trying to decide where to eat with them is a pain in the ass. We can't go to any of the "usual" fast food restaurants and whenever one of them decided they are not in the mood for burritos or sandwiches, it can be nearly impossible to decide on a place to go. None of them have any money due to the fact that they are (or were) liberal arts students, so going to a sit-down restaurant is out of the question. Once, the only restaurant they could agree on was one that was an Italian fast food place five miles away! The obvious irony is that SWPLs are environmentalists, yet they wanted to drive ten miles roundtrip to eat at a place that is about as greasy as McDonald's. I guess it was okay because it was "ethnic" food.

SWPL friends can be a pain in the ass sometimes.

Google Censors Epic Beard Man

I don't have much to say about the fight between Epic Beard Man and Amber Lamps that hasn't been covered already by others, although I do intend to write a couple more posts on this. For those of you who don't know, a video surfaced on YouTube chronicling a fight on an Oakland bus. A drunken black man (Amber Lamps) and a 67-year old white man (Epic Beard Man) were having an argument on a bus, Epic Beard Man got up and went to the front of the bus, Amber Lamps followed, and they continued arguing. Then Amber struck Epic Beard Man, who stood up and punched Amber repeatedly in the face. (Amber Lamps is referred to as such due to the fact that he calls for an ambulance, which sounds like "Amber Lamps" due to his injuries and Ebonics. Encylcopedia Dramatica assigns the name "Amber Lamps" to a random woman who witnessed the incident, but I think the phrase is better as a nickname for the the drunk guy.)

The video can be viewed here. I linked to Dailymotion because the EBM original and most of the reposts have been removed from Google-owned Youtube.

What most people do not know is that Google is actively censoring this story. Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki hosting articles related to various nerd and Internet subcultures, had their article regarding the EBM meme delisted so it can not be found at all via Google. The article can be found here, but is NSFW and if you find nudity, gore, porn, and very bad language offensive, do not visit Encyclopedia Dramatica. However, the rest of Encyclopedia Dramatica, including pages with content much more vulgar and offensive, is listed in Google's index and can even be found via Google's query suggestions.

Speaking of Google's query suggestions, despite the fact that the man is an Internet celebrity, there are no Google query suggestions for him. The closest ones are "epic beard" and "epic beards," which link to pictures of men with weird beards, although EBM-related content is also accessible. However, there are no query suggestions for "epic beard man" or even "AC transit bus fight," the more "professional" term used to describe the fight. In contrast, Microsoft's Bing search engine displays search suggestions relating to the fight, including "epic beard man encyclopedia dramatica."

The reason why Google is attempting to censor this is obvious. 98% of its employee's contributions went to the Democrats in 2004, and the fact that it is highly liberal has been established many times before. This fight is an anathema to liberals. They hate the idea of self-defense. Most hardcore liberal men are meek and feminized and liberal women hate all things masculine (future blog post topic) and boxing a man who assaults you and winning is a very masculine thing to do. Also, liberals tend to be pro-criminal. They don't openly admit this, but they minimize the harm criminals cause, blame the crime on "society," and whine about the police being racist. Thus, their sympathy for criminals leads them to dislike anyone who fights back against and injures them.

There is another reason. Many whites are used to reading about black thugs killing, raping, and robbing whites. Indeed, the reason why white people live in suburbs and drive forty-five minutes to work is because they seek to avoid black crime. In the last year or so, there have been many video-taped and publicized incidents in which blacks have beaten whites on school buses and public buses. This time, when the black went to beat up the white, he got his face beat up so badly he couldn't pronounce "ambulance." Google and other liberals are afraid that this man will become a hero to whites (like Joe Horn was a few years back) and ultimately incidents like this will help repeal the taboo on discussing black crime in America. That is why they hate Epic Beard Man.

EDIT: Changed the description of the black guy from being a thug to being drunk, after watching the video linked to by Veritas' comment.

Watering the Tree of Liberty

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

-Thomas Jefferson, 1787

By now most people have heard about Joseph Stack's suicide attack on an Austin, Texas, building housing an IRS office. He hates corporations, but he also hates the government. Trying to place him in our outdated left-right spectrum results in something comparable to a division by zero error on a computer. Still, some people are trying to figure out if he is a liberal or conservative. After having a "conservative" Republican president who spent like he could create money with the snap of his fingers (oh... wait) and a "liberal" Democratic president who bails out corporations, I thought people would have started to realize how stupid the left-right model really is.

Fox News' big headline is "Crime or Terror? Questions Over Why Attack on IRS Isn't Domestic Terror." In the article itself they quote Austin police chief Art Acevedo as saying "I call it a cowardly, criminal act, and there was no excuse for it."

While I am of the opinion that his arson attack on his house and his attempted murder of his wife and children was a cowardly, criminal attack, his suicide attack on the IRS was neither cowardly, nor criminal. In America, we often accuse so-called terrorists - especially suicide attackers - of being cowardly, but they really are not (Bill Maher and Dinesh D'Souza discussed this on Maher's show shortly after the 9/11 attacks). Joseph Stack was not afraid to die to send his message and he died with his victims. He was a hell of a lot more brave than an AC-130 gunner or a B-2 pilot killing their victims from far above them without any real danger to themselves.

As for labeling his attack on the IRS terrorist, that term does not apply to him. He was not trying to terrorize the civilian population, he was sending a message to the tax collectors of the largest government on earth. And anyways, the word "terrorist" has basically come to refer to the weaker side of any 4GW conflict. Terrorism is committed not just by individuals and non-state actors, but by governments, as well. The powers that be will never refer to the Dresden firebombing, the Waco massacre, the bombing of Serbia, or the war in Iraq as terrorism, yet state terrorism has killed more people than domestic terrorists and Islamic terrorists ever will.

As mentioned above, I believe his attempted murder of his wife and children was a criminal act, but his attack on the IRS was not. He was not the criminal, that role belongs to the IRS, the largest gang of racketeers in history. The IRS destroys people's lives, families, businesses, prosperity, and future so the federal government can have money to redistribute to the underclass, bailout and subsidize big business, and bomb people thousands of miles away. In my opinion, Joseph Stack was like people who shoot burglars or robbers, only he took on a much larger and dangerous robber.

Some might respond, the IRS workers are just doing what they are required to do by law and, besides, they need to support their families somehow. "Just following orders" has never worked as a defense. People are ultimately responsible for their own actions. And the vast majority of people are able to support their families with productive (or at least non-destructive) jobs that do not involve stealing from others.

Joseph Stack was the newest individual in the long line of Americans who have watered the Tree of Liberty.

Tea Party Demographics

Over at Alternut, Tana Ganeva has a post entitled "Shocking: Tea Partiers Mostly Rich, White, Christian Guys." The data can be found here (PDF).

Much like all the founding fathers and most of the Republican party, a whole lot of the Tea Partiers are rich, white, Christian men. According to a new CNN poll (via TPM), a majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

2010 is well before 2042, so whites are still a majority of the American population. Thus it should not be surprising that most Tea Partiers are white. Also, while women outnumber men in the United States, the gender gap is small enough that it would fall within the margin of error. The fact that most fall into the "Protestant/Other Christain (sic) groups" category is interesting but unsurprising. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal (but that's okay) and many American Catholics are either Democrat-supporting Hispanics or members of white ethnic groups that lean Democrat.

Keep in mind that "most," "mostly," and "majority" are vague terms meaning "greater than 50%." She never cites the exact statistics for those categories in her post, so those words are basically meaningless.

Regardless, it makes sense that whites make up most of the Tea Party movement. Whites pay most of the federal income taxes and blacks and Hispanics take a disproportionate amount in government services. True, poor blacks and Hispanics, like everyone else, pay payroll taxes, but they are basically refunded this through the EIC. Even in this era of multiculturalism, white self-hatred, and political correctness, the observation that whites pay more in taxes than NAMs is not lost on whites.

According to the data, the racial breakdown of the Tea Party activists was 80% white, 2% black, and 10% Hispanic. The percentages of all respondents was 71% white, 2% black, and 11% Hispanic. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. So it looks like the whiteness of the Tea Party movement is not due to the lack of Hispanic participation, but rather due to the fact that blacks want free stuff from Obama. The relatively high percentage of Hispanics in the movement compared to the overall population is probably due to the fact that only registered voters were polled, excluding illegal and non-citizen legal immigrants.

As for the fact that most of the Tea Partiers are men, it makes sense. After all, women can't exactly teabag liberals. Seriously, if you look at the data Ganeva linked to, 60% of the Tea Party Activists are male, which is a pretty substantial majority. This is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be supporting a family on their income, so they want to be able to keep more of their money, whereas a single career woman is only supporting herself and her cats and single mothers are essentially wedded to Big Government - they use it as a second source of income. Plus, women in general are more likely to support larger government.

It gets even better:

Also, most went to college. 40 percent are college grads, compared to just 28 percent of total poll respondents, and 34 percent have some college.

So much for the liberal myth that conservative voters are bunch of dumb rednecks. It's funny that liberals frequently accuse conservatives of being "anti-intellectual" and "anti-education," yet Tana uses this as evidence of how out of touch the Tea Partiers are. I thought being college educated was supposed to be a good thing.

They make a ton more money than the other people interviewed for the study: 34 percent make over $75,000, while 32 make between $50,000 and $75,000. That’s way more than half pulling in over $50,000. So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves(.)

I agree with the headline that this is "shocking." It is shocking that liberals are so out of touch with reality.

Here we have the liberal definition of "rich": someone making more than $50,000 a year. That's funny. I'm willing to bet that most of the white New Englanders and Left Coasters make more than $50,000 a year. So do most of the young, suburban Obamanites.

Actually, the people she considers rich make much less than $50,000 when you consider the fact that they have to feed the Leviathan with FICA, federal income tax, state income tax, property tax, sales tax, use tax, and myriad other taxes. (Aside: a good resource on taxes
in the USSA is the National Taxpayers Union.)
Where I come from, we have a term for someone making between $50,000 and $75,000: middle-class. Of course, I'm just from Jesusland. What would I know about anything.

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, lowpaying (sic) jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism."

Here we have some poor-worshiping. I don't think a liberal is capable of writing anything without a poor-worshiping paragraph. Yes, there are some poor people who are impoverished through no fault of their own and spend most of their time working. But most of these "poor people" are poor because they are drug-addicts, had kids at a young age, have low IQs, are criminals, or are just lazy. They have time to go to da club, smoke crack and weed, get drunk, and breed bastard children, so they have plenty of time. They choose not to go to Tea Parties because they disagree with the goals - they want more money from the government. Karl Marx called these people the "lumpenproletariat," while the current PC term is "underclass."

The rest of the "poor people" of whom she writes are either the kind of people Thomas Frank dislikes, working-class (proletariat) or rural whites who vote Republican, or they are people who had well-paying jobs until the Bush-Obama tag team (yes, I am oversimplifying) screwed everything up.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis. “Populism” liberals just don’t grasp, of course, because they’re all elitist and stuff

No, you don't grasp because you are too out of touch with reality and your ideology is defined by cognitive dissonance. You think global warming is bad, but nuclear power plants need to be shut down. Wind power is necessary, but you don't want wind farms in your back yard. We need to help the poor, but you don't donate any money to charities. The Iraq War is bad, but bombing white Christian Serbs is good. Bill Ayers is a good man, but Glenn Beck promotes sedition. I've gone a little off topic, but I think I've made my point about liberals' cognition and why it should be of no concern if they don't understand Tea Party populism.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider our associations of the word “elite” so it at least slightly correlates with things like money and privilage (sic).

When liberals refer to "privilege" they refer to their belief that every white, no matter their social class, is born with privilege that every black (even, say, Clarence Thomas) lacks. It's like the secular liberal version of original sin.

The fact is, someone who makes $65,000 a year (closer to $45,000 or so after taxes), is not "elite." The elites make more money than Tana could comprehend with her little mind (after all, anyone who thinks $50,000 is rich probably can't count too high). And guess what? In the 2008 election, people with incomes over $200,000 and people with master's and doctoral degrees favored Obama. Those are the elites. Accountants, truck drivers, small business owners, engineers, and retired factory workers are not.

Given demographic trends (PDF), this is definitely the movement the GOP should hitch their wagon to.

Her sarcastic remark is actually correct. More and more, white people are starting to realize what Obama and the Democrats really are and that no matter how hard you try, you can't please blacks. You'll just be called a racist.

The fact is, as America gets blacker and browner, more whites will begin to realize that the multicultural paradise is not arriving. They will notice the high crime rates, the failed schools, the roving, wilding gangs of black and Hispanic "youths," and the growing number of welfare parasites leeching off the 35% of their income they feed to the Leviathan. White Democrats who are exposed to this morph into Republicans. Now, the Republican Party as it currently exists is only slightly better than the Democratic Party, but the Tea Party movement has the potential to turn it into a true vanguard of liberty and sanity.

Government Paid Broadband Internet

That's the newest campaign of the parasite left, as promoted here and advertised here. They want the federal government, via the Universal Service Fund, to help pay for mobile phone and broadband internet for the poor. This isn't really news, as Obama has been pushing for the government to work towards ending the digital divide, which is Beltway-speak for "make overtaxed working-,middle-, and upper-class white people pay even more money to give free stuff to blacks and Mexicans."

According to this article, the average cost of broadband internet is $35/month, which adds up to $420 a year. Liberals practically worship poor people, but the vast majority of poor people (excluding Mexican immigrants who work multiple jobs) are lazy, lack a decent work ethic, and are undependable. I used to be a bleeding heart liberal, but my exposure to ghetto trash of all races while working in various jobs during high school and college helped to cure me of that affliction. I've worked with poor people who would spend their weekends going to "da club", smoking various types of illegal and legal drugs, and getting drunk. They would come in the next morning forty-five minutes late due to a hangover (hence, the "undependable" part), while the rest of the week they would incessantly complain about being broke. For the price of one Saturday night's worth of clubbing and drinking, the poor could buy a month's worth of broadband Internet access.

Anti-Unionism

Most libertarians and conservatives, with the exception some paleocons and left-libertarians, are staunch opponents of trade unions. Warner Todd Huston, a rather eccentric "conservative" (and from his picture, evidently a donut-eating contest winner) has said "unions are inherently unAmerican", a belief not uncommon on the mainstream right. Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist Lew Rockwell even titled a UAW-related blogpost "Another Criminal Strike". Indeed, the LewRockwell.com writers in general frequently refer to unions as criminal gangs.

As a libertarian, I oppose the privileges granted to unions by the federal government, but nor do I like the privileges granted to corporations and groups of corporations by all levels of government, including eminent domain takings, tax increment financing, subsidies, and insane copyright laws such as the DMCA (which in no way "promote(s) the Progress of Science and useful Arts", but that's a topic for another day). Corporations themselves are government creations and receive special protections and privileges from governments. Now, I realize that libertarians criticize corporate welfare and Big Business, but it is ludicrous that conservatives and Chamber of Commerce libertarians will call Big Labor criminals and anti-American while at the same time verbally fellating Big Business, which can be pretty criminal and anti-American itself (i.e. hiring illegal immigrants).

Sure, the SEIU is probably close to being a criminal organization, but I doubt anyone could honestly call the bricklayers union a group of thugs. In some trades, joining the union means higher wages and better benefit, so it makes sense for the workers to join unions, just as it makes sense for different corporations of certain fields to form trade associations to protect their interests and for white-collar workers to join professional organizations (for example, the IEEE).

The union most frequently targeted by conservatives is the National Education Assocation (NEA). The conservative hatred of the NEA is comparable to the liberal hatred of Wal-Mart. Yes, the NEA is dominated by liberals and feminists, but whenever a conservative bashes the NEA, inevitably they bring up its policies that affect "urban students." These commentators correctly note the fact that urban schools, well, suck.

However, the fact that urban schools suck has nothing to do with the NEA. Suburban students are taught by NEA members and they have decent test scores. The fact is, urban schools suck because they are predominantly black and Hispanic, while suburban schools are attended by whites and Asians. Blacks have a mean IQ of 85, Hispanics 89, Whites 103, and Asians 106. Lower IQ students will simply do worse in school than higher IQ students. Neither the liberal solution, spending more gigadollars on urban schools, nor the conservative solution, abolishing the NEA (and giving the black kids vouchers), will solve this.

Yes, this post was supposed to be about anti-unionism, but I wanted to point out how far conservatives will go just to prove that they are not racist to liberals who will hate them anyways and blacks who will never vote for them.

Hello

Welcome to my blog.

I'm a libertarian living in what liberals refer to as "flyover country", thus the title. Not too creative, but it works.

Unlike most libertarians, I openly acknowledge racial differences and will be writing about them. Due to my race realist beliefs, I am more pro-law enforcement than most libertarians. I recognize that the difference in incarceration rates between blacks and whites is not because the po-leece are racists, but largely due to racial differences in average IQ.

Also, I'm a college student so from time to time I will be writing about the latest nonsense spewing from the Ivory Tower. I'm a STEM student so I have no liberal propagandists as professors, but even as a STEM student it is hard to avoid the liberal idiocy that pervades every modern university.