Wednesday ORT: Avatar Brain, Stellantis Invests, GM Whines, Autopian Partners, MDG Is Formulaic

All readers welcome

Good afternoon, friends. It’s been more than ten years since D’Angelo reappeared to bring us Black Messiah. (All the links and videos in that old article are dead, unfortunately.) Yesterday he lost the battle against pancreatic cancer. I don’t know how long he has been sick. His artistic output was always well done, but unfortunately rare as well; I have the impression that he was his own biggest critic. Some day they’ll find five hundred hours of music he decided not to release, and it will all be fantastic. Give the man credit, however: he went out with this track at the end of Black Messiah. If there is a more deeply sentimental and skillful bit of pop music production out there than “Another Life”, I have yet to encounter it.

I can tolerate anything except for white men

Eight years ago, I wrote about Avatar as a metaphor for how some progressives wish to experience the world. Back in 2022, James Cameron finally managed to get a sequel out the door. Rather hilariously, part of the new movie’s plot is that Jake Sully, the human Marine who joined the aliens through their tree-magic, has now become the chief of the tribe. This is, of course, pure progressive fanservice and wish-fulfillment; it is also deeply racist. Why would a human be a better choice for chief of an alien tribe than… any of the aliens would be? Same reason, one supposes, that Rachel Dolezal, who now goes by “Nkechi Amare Diallo”, did such a bang-up job as a professor of Africana and leader of the NAACP.

(I would be remiss if I did not mention that Ms. Diallo has an Only Fans that is remarkably explicit and which, frankly, speaks well of the shape she’s in at the age of 47.)

At its heart, Avatar is a white supremacist film, the same way that Save The Last Dance was a white supremacist film. In fact, any anti-tourist-style movie where someone from the dominant culture briefly joins a subculture and becomes the leader and master of it is a white supremacist film. If you want two counter-examples, look at The Last Samurai and Sicario. In the former, Tom Cruise “becomes a samurai”, but he isn’t the best samurai, he’s not even among the best samurai, and his final purpose in the film is to serve as a messenger for the dead man who trained him. In the latter, Emily Blunt turns out to be completely worthless in the Juarez underworld, while Benicio del Toro effortlessly accomplishes everything she cannot.

But that’s not the only message of Avatar. The second message in the film, and the reason I’m going to use the phrase “Avatar Brain” for some people going forward, is just as repugnant. Let’s start by giving credit to this Substacker for an explanation of “Jedi Brain”:

Jedi Brain is a term (I’ve also heard Disney Brain, Marvel Brain, and the like) for a mental state wherein people’s main frame of reference for understanding politics, war, and the interrelationship between them is mass media entertainment products. There are good guys and bad guys, each occupying a respective political identity, and it is the job of the former to seek a more just order by destroying the latter. Narrative coherence tends toward the personification of each side in small groups of heroes on the one hand and one big villain on the other. This latter figure is the wellspring of Team Evil’s grand scheme; if he is destroyed, so goes with him all the bad stuff he represents.

The reader might reasonably ask what is so bad about Jedi Brain; after all, haven’t people used fiction, myth, or legend to understand current events since the dawn of time? The difference is that Star Wars and the various Disney/capeshit movies are fundamentally infantile. By that, I don’t mean “bad”. I just mean that there’s no realistic ambiguity. Thinking that relatively complex and often well-intentioned human beings on the political stage are “Voldemort” or “Palpatine” leads to stuff like, uh, shooting someone in the neck because he wanted to have a debate on a college campus. If you think Donald Trump is a Marvel villain, then you’re going to have trouble encompassing his role in the current Gaza issue.

(Well, actually you won’t; you will just view whatever he’s doing as if it was Dr. Doom or whoever doing it. Why is he stopping Israel from killing any more Gazans, or vice versa? There must be an even more evil plan coming up!)

So “Jedi Brain” is when you look at the real world and force it to fit into whatever goofy-ass worldview you’ve internalized from media that you should have stopped consuming around puberty. (After the age of 17, any American male should really only be getting his ideas from the films and TV shows of Michael Mann.) What is “Avatar Brain”? I’ll show you before I tell you:

One of you sent me a link to this person, whose entire public persona and business model is based on criticizing white people in general and white men in particular. It’s never data-driven or even anecdote-driven; rather, she just makes emotional statements without any justification then basks in the ten thousand “YASS QUEEN” comments. I think her shtick is successful at least in part because she looks like her primary concern in life should be the hygiene condition of the ear-piercing machine at Claire’s but instead she is militantly advocating for the extinction of Anglo-Americans. But if you listen to what she says, and the phrasing she uses, you’ll quickly see the unintentional comedy of her posturing.

Consider the statement in one of her reels: “White men are only empathetic to get laid.” In the reel she explains that this attitude is, somehow, “a byproduct of capitalism”. Put aside for a moment the fact that she couldn’t make this statement about the men of any other specific racial or social group without getting run out of Instagram on a rail. How genuinely stupid is she to think that feigning empathy for sex is a unique trait of white men? That is a race-independent male trait that probably dates back to Australopithecus.

There are only two reasons she would limit her statement to white men. The first would be because she is an arrant racist who is desperately hoping to stoke violence against white men. The second, and more likely, possibility is that she has only experienced fake-empathy-for-sex from white men, because the vast majority of her lifetime experience is with white men.

Let’s go back to Avatar for a moment. Why does Jake the Marine abandon his own species in order to fight for the aliens? Because he is disgusted at the greedy, violent, anti-environmental behavior of his fellow Marines, and he’s charmed by the Noble Savage lifestyles of the aliens. But here’s the thing: he knows basically nothing about the aliens. He’s at Alien Summer Camp, more or less, just hanging out with a few of them for a brief slice of their lives. For all he knows, the aliens make a secret habit out of eating their own babies. They could have all sorts of disgusting practices. He just hasn’t seen those practices, because 99.9% of his lifetime experience has been with human beings.

I have a friend who spent about 15 years of his life moving from one “destination city” to another. Portland, Seattle, Nashville, Austin, you name it. The story was always the same:

0. He would move to the new city and enthuse about how progressive everyone was, and how beautiful the culture was, and how he couldn’t believe he had ever bothered to live anywhere else.

1. After a while he would get disenchanted with “the scene” and start to form some genuine personal animosities with other people there.

2. By the time he’d lived there a year, he would be convinced that everyone there was a phony, or a racist, or a toxic person.

3. At which point he would pick a new city, and move there…

4. …and the cycle would start from the beginning.

In his forties, he gave up and moved back into his rural-Ohio childhood home, where he finally found some peace. You could argue that he’d finally freed himself from a form of “Avatar Brain” where the next city would absolutely have the right sort of people in it.

When our Instagram friend above is fifty years old and she’s slept with enough different kinds of men to fill up a season’s worth of Benetton ads, she will probably come to realize that all men suffer from similar frailties and moral defects. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that she will mature and become self-aware enough to realize that all humans suffer from those problems, regardless of race or sex.

Until then, however, she will have “Avatar Brain”. She will continually expose her lack of sophistication in public, to say nothing of her razor-slim slice of social acquaintance, by assigning universal problems exclusively to white men. Her primary understanding of men from other cultures will be whatever Netflix shows her — aren’t all black men basically Idris Elba?¹ Aren’t all Sikh dudes like the handsome fellow from The English Patient?

It’s a common trope among college-educated Americans that racism is simply a side effect of being provincial or ignorant, and there’s some basis in truth for that belief. It’s very easy to demonize people or groups you’ve never met or barely know. The flip side of that, however, is that relatively stupid and non-self-aware people often assume that everyone they don’t know is, in fact, perfectly innocent and good — a mistake assisted in no small part by an American media determined to perform social engineering on a large scale via outright distortion of the facts.

We can close by noting that Jedi Brain and Avatar Brain are both, at their root, comforting theories of mind. After all, if defeating evil is as simple as blowing up one space station, then it’s possible, right? And if white men really are the source of all the world’s evil, well, aren’t they vastly outnumbered by the good guys? If only reality were as simple as an animated film… or even as simple as our favorite non-animated films. “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Easier said than done.

Stellantis goes native

File this one under “The haters will say it could have happened at any time”: Stellantis to Invest $13 Billion to Grow in the United States.

• Belvidere, home of the Neon, will reopen with $600M in investment to build the Cherokee and Compass.

• An all-new midsize truck (!!) will be built in Toledo thanks to a $400M investment.

• An all new large SUV to be made at Warren Truck, plus retrofits to Detroit Jefferson for an all-new Durango.

• Kokomo, IN to produce an all-new 4-cylinder engine. This almost certainly happened because of the sad and sentimental Michelle Zauner tune.

Five thousand manufacturing jobs will be added, with more to come from suppliers and affiliated operations.

This is what we call good news. This means thousands of families will have a chance at a better, more stable life. It means we will have new automobiles built in the United States. Do we have time for a screencap? Yes we do:

Haha, NYT, go fig yourself.

The media is never right about automotive, part two

Gosh, Barron’s, why could GM stock be trending up after they announce a $1.6 billion charge related to “realigning” of EV production? Let me put on my Jedi Brain hat and explain it to you in ways you’ll understand, using imaginary headlines:

• Ford Stock Goes Up As Edsel Is Discontinued; Analysts Are Confused

• Apple Stock Goes Up As Innovative $10,000 “Lisa” Computer Disappears From Stores; Analysts Are Confused

• Atari Finally Buried Each And Every One Of Those F**kin’ “E.T.” Cartridges In A Landfill, Won’t Make Any More Of Them; Analysts Surprised To See The Stock Rise

• This Morning I Stopped A Fourteen-Year-Long Habit Of Head-Butting A Concrete Wall As Hard As I Possibly Could Each And Every Morning Before Breakfast; Analysts Confused As To Why I’m Feeling Slightly Better

Patrick George is calling this the “whiplash era” because President Trump had the temerity to undo the policies of his predecessors, presumably because no one told him that the arc of history bends inevitably towards taxpayer subsidy of $120,000 luxury EVs. I call it the “sanity era”. Let’s hope it continues, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Now let’s see the rest of the camel

Oh, this is interesting: The nice people at The Autopian are partnering with Hagerty Marketplace. Back when I was in the bagel business, I used to spend what felt like ten hours a week trying to convince various vice presidents and suchlike to support our own media efforts instead of making random people wealthy for no reason. My position was that we had the very best people possible, doing the best work they were permitted to do, and that we would always be better off building our own brand equity rather than jumping into bed with whatever podcast host was getting the executives horny at the time.

There’s a long inside-baseball chain of custody here; Matt Hardigree was with TangentVector during Hagerty’s short-lived and ill-fated experiment with a daily video show produced by that firm, so I’d guess he is point of contact for this partnership as well. Well, I hope the Autopian puts the cash to good use. It could be worse; that mook Phil Toledano, “Mister Enthusiast”, could be back on the payroll. The executives used to enthuse about that dude and his “Viva Bastardo” podcast. I never got the point of that, or why exactly he was making such a big deal about being a “bastardo”. I mean, take just one look at the dude and it’s obvious he has no idea who his actual father is, right?

Sugar and spice and racing each day twice, that’s what little girls are made of

The best way I can think of to describe my weekend was this: Saturday afternoon I found myself about to start the SCCA Big Bore class from pole position in my Radical SR8. Ahead of me: a twelve-lap race against a half-dozen TA2 and GT1 cars that all had 200 horsepower more than I do, plus the ability to literally decapitate me any time their drivers decided to take whatever space I was occupying. I’d be lapping slower traffic that would be unable to see or hear me until I was past them, which always makes things interesting. I was also on cooked storage tires from 2024, so I would need to drive the thing at the absolute cranked limit just to stay ahead of everyone else, plus I would be at constant risk of locking the wheels and visiting a concrete barrier when I began braking down from 157mph on the back straight…

…and all I could think of was “Thank God MDG’s races are over for the day.” Yet this agitation was my own fault, because I was the one who had come up with the idea for my daughter to make her debut in Formula Enterprises, in addition to racing her normal Spec Racer Ford class. The “FE2” is a Mazda-powered open-wheel car that is a little bit faster than an F4 car but not really close to a global F3. It’s capable of getting around Mid-Ohio a full 16 seconds a lap better than the Spec Racer Ford — in fact, it’s a bit faster than my smaller Radical, and I often find myself running heads-up with them.

Keep in mind that two years ago, MDG didn’t know how to drive a stick shift. And I’d just talked her into driving something that is nontrivially faster than, say, the F1 Academy cars. Well, what can I say, dear reader? I have faith in her. She’s braver than almost any male racer I know and she is relentlessly committed to going faster than all of them.

It would be more dramatic, and more entertaining, to detail some sort of movie-style struggle where she failed horribly in the early stages before triumphing at the end — but the fact is that after her crew got the car adjusted for someone of her more-than-F1-Academy-chick height, she got used to the FE2 very quickly. She never went off-course or spun. The scariest part of the weekend was Saturday’s morning race where it was 50 degrees outside and she almost looped under cold-tire throttle at the start, as seen in the video above. She ran a total of six sessions in the car, including two races, and was faster in each successive session.

The team crewing her car, Alliance Autosport, happens to hold the Mid-Ohio lap record and they were able to coach her using that data. She’s on par with said record pace in about half the turns, and pulling more than 3g in Turn One. There’s still plenty of room for improvement in her overall time but she proved able to dust all but two of the similar-capability Formula Continentals in her race group.

Then she got back in the Spec Racer Ford, which is very boring to her now, and did pretty well there until the engine started running on fewer than the mandatory four cylinders. I don’t think we will be able to keep her in the Spec Racer Ford after the final race of the season next week. I think she will be in an FE2, or possibly an actual F4 car, for 2026.

Her mother had a more star-crossed race weekend. She lost the clutch in Saturday’s race, so she had to start from 15th place on Sunday. Somehow she got up to second place overall, largely through pure resentment, then had the transmission overheat with two laps to go, placing her third overall.

As for me: I started both of my races from pole and won both of them. Sunday’s 19-lap feature event is worth a minor brag because in my last lap I set a 1:27.1 on Club Course with… a right front tire that was down to 15psi. I knew something was wrong from about the third lap but I didn’t want to lose a race in front of MDG or my son so I held my breath in the fast left handers. There was an easy 1:25 in it had the tire behaved, which would have put me pretty close to the GTX record for Club. (I already hold the record for Pro configuration.)

Truth be told, however, my own starts seem pretty anticlimactic lately. I have these children out here flying planes and driving formula cars. I’m starting to think that I’ll enjoy the weekends more if I just focus on their races and stop trying to squeeze my own starts in there. Nevertheless, I am the SCCA Great Lakes Divisional Champion for 2025 in both P2 and GTX class, and I’d like to hold onto at least one of those titles for a couple more years so, as St. Augustine once said, “Lord, give me chastity… but not yet.”

(Photos by The Commander.)

1. By which we mean cultured, British, James-Bond-adjacent Idris, not “Stringer Bell”.