If you’re a conservative who lives, works, or shops in Charlottesville, you learn fairly quickly that you’re not welcome there.
Dymphna has written previously about the unsolicited negative remarks made to her by a fellow customer in a Barnes and Noble store when she dared to examine a conservative book.
A car with a conservative or Republican bumper sticker may be egged, keyed, have its antenna and side mirrors broken, or — in extreme cases — get a brick through its windshield.
It’s just a fact of life about the city, like the scarcity of parking on the Corner or the traffic congestion on 29 North. To paraphrase an old southern racial joke: in Charlottesville you’re either Liberal or Quiet.
Such attitudes within effete quasi-literate American culture radiate outwards from Hollywood. Chances are that any fashionable lefty slogan, cause, or T-shirt image was first popularized by some Tinseltown airhead.
Not Evil, Just Wrong — The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria is “a feature length documentary which shows how extreme environmentalism is damaging lives of the most vulnerable populations in the developed and developing world, from the ban on DDT to the current campaigns on Global Warming.” That is, it’s very politically incorrect, and makes cheeseburgers out of one of the Left’s most sacred cows.
The makers of the movie discovered just how politically incorrect they were when they attempted to have their movie translated into foreign languages for subtitling. They contacted various American translation services, and here’s what they discovered:
One of the companies, in the midst of the biggest recessions in living memory, said “our order was too big” and declined to bid for the contract.
However, the Atlanta based International Services translation company really gave the game away when in an email they explained why they were refusing to provide us with their services.
CEO Sue Ellen Reager stated:
– – – – – – – – –
“I have researched your film on the web, and do not see scientific reviews or major press reviews in support (may be too early), and needed that support to assure cooperation from our translators. Because we translate with highly educated people around the world, located in countries like Germany and France, who take Global Warming very seriously, I am fairly sure that several countries will refuse to participate in this project.“
In a follow up telephone conversation Ms Reager explained to “you guys in Europe” how the system really worked.
Ms Reager and her company have “worked in Hollywood for years” she explained. Their client list includes CNN, Turner Broadcasting, Google and Microsoft.
At first she blamed her European translators.
“Your content looks like it is refuting many assertions made by Al Gore and Europe is pro Al Gore… and I am pretty sure they will refuse to participate…we deal with really classy people in Germany and anything attacking Al Gore they will refuse.“
Do they really love Al Gore that much in Europe? Here in the USA Big Al is mostly a joke, fodder for late-night TV comics. He’s widely ridiculed by ordinary people, and is only held in reverence by the rarefied Loony Left-Hollywood Axis of Weevils.
Maybe Europeans have different tastes. After all, the French consider Jerry Lewis’ films to be the highest form of comedic Art.
Anyway, the ultimate insult was the inference that the makers of Not Evil, Just Wrong might resemble — gasp! —Republicans:
Speaking on the phone Ms Reager said that in the email she was “just being nice” to us because we were Europeans and that she was worried that the film might be like some of the “Republican s**t” that gets released in the US.
The real problem is with those pesky Republicans in the US who insist on making films that she and Hollywood don’t agree with.
“I didn’t know whether your documentary is fact based or part of the rubbish that Republicans make. You wouldn’t believe the crap they put out. It is unbelievable s**t, incredible lies,“ she said.
Many Republicans put out films that are just “faith based imaginings,” she added.
If there were ever a “faith based imagining”, the Great Global Warming Scare is a prime example. No deviation from orthodoxy is permitted, and no evidence contradicting the faith can ever be considered. Heretics are expelled from the community and shunned.
For decades a popular slogan for environmentally-minded people in our area has been “Save the Bay”. It’s a reference to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which has suffered from exploding development in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area (which happens to be driven by the metastasis of the federal government).
Some years back I saw a bumper sticker in Charlottesville with an amusing variant on this slogan: “Pave the Bay”.
I wonder how long his windshield lasted.
Hat tip: Nilk.
As for Al Gore and the German situation, let me try to explain it like this: people will believe the biggest lie if you only loudly repeat it often enough. Which was probably one of the few things which Göbbels said that were undeniably true.
Then, the prime sources to run such a documentary (meaning, the sources willing to invest money in it in the first place) are by the very nature of their programming the state-run broadcasters, which are legally tasked with providing a certain quota of educational programmes. And those broadcasters are, by the very nature of the personnel they attract, heavily left-leaning, the ARD (1st channel) even more so than the ZDF (2nd channel).
So you end up trying to sell your movie to a board which in significant parts is constituted of people with cultural and moral relativist, anti-western, anti-capitalist and enviro-whacky convictions.
Which leaves you with the private broadcasters. Who are unlikely to run it in a prime-time spot, and have a bad reputation – education and fact-wise – anyway.
stratomunchkin —
You’re right, but these people are trying to get the film into theaters, not on TV.
Look at the link; it’s an ambitious, worthwhile project especially when you consider the world-wide dismal outcomes for the Gore creed. If he and his 3 billion bucks are successful, it will cause irreparable damage.
The dummy is a frustrated wannabe president so he’s going to bring us all down with his utopian balderdash.
Seriously, his daddy raised him to be president and he had no second act until global warming fairy tales showed up. This literally saved him, as you can see by pictures of him in the year after he lost his bid for the Oval Office.
Greendom saved him and gave him a Utopia to strive for. With 3 bn, he’s a Mack truck bearing down on the world.
Dymphna, I omitted the idea of the movie being released in theatres on purpose. There is no mass market for such a movie, at least none that’s profitable enough for the theatre chains here to run it. Documentaries in general don’t generate much viewers for movie theatres, unless they touch on strong, pre-existing notions.
Voyage of the Penguins did well, because two decades of artic environment destruction scaremongering via Greenpeace and the Green Party have left a mark on the public’s conscience, and, of course, because it pulls women and children in because penguins are seen as cuddly and cute.
An Inconvenient Truth likewise did well, because it could draw on twenty-five years of unquestioned belief in the mantra of Global Warming, transported via all aspects of our news media and large parts of the political establishment. It is necessary to understand that there is no party in parliament which has not ascribed to the idea of CO2-based, man-made global warming. In fact, even under former right of center governments, actions in support of measures against CO2-based, man-made global warming have been viciously persued. An Inconvenient Truth was mandantory viewing in class for many schools over here, and just as many took class time off and substituted it with visits to the movie theatres to watch it. There is no public foundation, no public basic belief against man-made global warming that would allow this movie to run at the box office. It pains me to say that, but that’s the way it is.
That’s why I did not even regard that point as being of any importance, because Ms Reager is right in that regard:
“…we deal with really classy people in Germany and anything attacking Al Gore they will refuse.“
They will. Hence why going direct-to-broadcast seemed to only viable option to me, and therein, only the private broadcasters would go with it.
The problem with you far right-wingers (I’m talkin’ ’bout you, B & D) is not that you question whether the response to global warming is disproportionate, which seems to me a quite appropriate question.
It’s that you have become enthralled with loony pseudo-scientists who claim global warming as a man-made phenomenon doesn’t exist, or is a hoax. There are mountains of scientific evidence saying otherwise. By getting into bed with these people you lose all credibility.
It’s like you have become the charter members of the Institute, or something.
I must take exception with your characterization of California.
I happen to have been born and raised in Southern Cal. This is a different world than Northern Cal is anyones book. (Hollywood is it’s own planet)
For your information I see just as many conservative bumber stickers and such here and liberal ones. The difference is that L.A. people are not nearly as into the whole us/them bit as people in your part of teh country. I have spent years living in both Chicago and New Orleans and have little good to say about the over all culture of the South. Upper Midwest folks on the other hand are mellow, cool and very nice despite beng a tad provincial to an L.A. mind.
I do not write blanket insults about your state, please do a bit more research before you pee all over mine.
Heretics Crusade
Outside of the Bay area and Hollywood Ca is actually a fairly moderate state.
“After all, the French consider Jerry Lewis’ films to be the highest form of comedic Art.”
Please. Enough with that canard. The French do not care about Jerry Lewis, barely know him and his films are practically never shown here.
If you absolutely have to make fun about the French liking an American movie figure that Americans do not care about, you might mention Woody Allen. Although in this case, I am afraid the joke would be on you, not on us.
If you insist on propagating this Jerry Lewis nonsense, we’ll send you a bunch of our leftist undercover agents, thoroughly Frenchify your neighbourhood, and generally make your life miserable by enforcing Socialist rule in your streets and bookshops.
Er… it seems someone already did that. Serves you right, I guess. I was never bullied in a Paris bookshop for picking up a conservative book.
Of course, it might be because there are almost no conservative books on display in most places. See this survey I made in an “independent” bookshop in Paris (in French) :
http://tinyurl.com/dnze8b
Most striking is the glaring lack of books discussing Islam. On the other hand, you’d thought this survey was made in 1946, judging from the astonishing number of freshly published books on the Second world war.
We all know the real danger comes from racist neo-Nazis nowadays.
The Poster Formerly Known as Gordon said…
The problem with you far right-wingers (I’m talkin’ ’bout you, B & D) is not that you question whether the response to global warming is disproportionate, which seems to me a quite appropriate question.
I stand with the far right wingers, ohhhh how terrible.
I belive in GW but do not subscibe to the Al Gore camp of nonsense and B.S. that has ben put out and brainwashed so many people. Where I live I have seen the damages done by the far left loons run a muck over the last thirty years. The tree hugger, earth muffin movement is as extreme as those nasty right wingers. There is plenty of credable and certified scientists that refute the horrific global warming crap that has perveted what people think about this issue. You can do own searching and research if you care to. By the way, not everyone who does not buy the extreme global waring garbage are “far right wingers.”
I know quite a few people
who are pretty far to the left, who did their homework and have seen through the hot air and gas
that bloats the radical GW camp.
By jumping on the radical GW
train one can lose credibilty
just as easy as those far
right wingers who refuse to
buy into ALL the radical
GW camp is trying to force feed society.
This documnetary is a threat to the far left and they know it. Thus the battle to muzzle and silence it at all costs. Typical and oh so popular from the PC crowd of leftards and loons.
My first experince with the spawns of these morons was when I was working in the woods as a faller, one who cuts down timber for living. My chainsaw ran into three railroad spikes that had been buried into the tree I was falling and it was only by the grace of God that I was not killed when the chain literally exploded when it hit one of those spikes. The force bent the bar on my chainsaw to an almost 90 degree angle and pieces of the chain were embedded into to arms and legs. Who claimed responsibility for these tactics? The jerks from Earth First. That was just the beginning. For those of you concerned, I never worked for a timber company that logged any of those “precious” old growth trees that are so sacred. I know pople who were horribly maimed and disabled by such tactics. A few were killed outright.
Nice work Dymphna, great post!
You’re right, Big Al is pretty big in Europe. But only with the PC MC crowd. Most anyone else couldn’t be bothered though. He’s just a media hype, hyped by MSM and the politicians and maybe a few from the cultural field. But that’s it.
Head Heretic —
I do not write blanket insults about your state, please do a bit more research before you pee all over mine.
Enlighten me — where did I say anything about California except for Hollywood?
I expressed no opinion about the rest of the state.
In any case, you can insult Virginia all you want. We’re used to it.
Robert Marchenoir —
Fair enough. I admit to living in a time warp! The Jerry Lewis gig was more than thirty years ago.
But it was true, at one time. I remember it well…
I am flabbergasted by the mass hysteria which has overtaken the Western world about man made global warming. It’s like prolonged belief in the “Invasion of the Martians” scam when rudimentary common sense should kibosh the whole thing e.g. “How did Greenland get its name?”.
The political class is near 100% compliant with the exception of Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. He alone has immunity as the only leader of a sizable country in the Western world with personal experience of totalitarian repression and tactics so he still recognizes them when they come dressed up in Green clothes.
Politicians chase votes so that means their citizenry is demanding they act on the green file. Working backwards, we arrive at a coterie of demagogues like Gore, media “reporter”-propagandists and education bureaucrats who have indoctrinated the populace successfully in junk science.
It is also disappointing to discover how many so called scientists are either leftist ideologues (thought the hard sciences were not as corrupted as social sciences at the university level) or whores who will study and write anything for money. The scientists who are speaking up against the scam, many endangering their careers are true heroes.