▼Arbre Mort▼ aka Willow Smith

I'm always confused when people single out one of the lone black legacy families in Hollywood as where they want to feel gross about occupation of undue cultural space.

I'm not

b/c it's a thread about the smiths? because complain about dynasties of all kinds, all the time.

PEOPLE complain, i meant to write

and the smiths are horrible crypto-scientologists with creepily entitled children?

i mean, racism is everywhere, but it's not like we need another reason to find the smiths kind of alarming, along with other celebrity scientologist families who make vanity films/records

The Smiths are the least alarming Scientologists out there!

i'm not sure about it, but even if it were true that's sort of like saying "nuclear proliferation is the least likely of these ten imminent threats to human civilization!"

it's very possible i'm missing out on most of the places where "people" (who? where?) routinely complain about black celebrity dynasties and avoid complaining about their white counterparts.

sorry i got in a dizzy, i just hate the oblique hand-waving sort of thing that greer is doing up there.

dizzy tizzy

feel like in the time of #gamergate ppl have to say some pretty dire stuff for me to find it all that terrible. teenagers pretentiously talking about how school sucks and they like driving around listening to music is just kinda... idk even if you dont think its funny its hardly something to object so strenuously too imo

Well they're starting to disprove my theory that people raised in the church of Scientology turn out more normal compared those who get into it later in life.

None of what they are talking about sounds very much like Scientology jargon tbh.

More like good old-fashioned common sense.

otm

this interview is delightful fuiud

"I gave one little quote and my dad got silly
- he said 'you're moving with your auntie and uncle in west philly'"

I'm always confused when people single out one of the lone black legacy families in Hollywood as where they want to feel gross about occupation of undue cultural space.

― Greer, Monday, November 17, 2014 9:01 PM Bookmark

mm hmmm

do they even take up that much cultural space these days? will smith's only made two movies this decade, and the one that wasn't a sequel to a 90s hit and co-starred his son bombed. jada's a supporting character on a tv show, the kids make mixtapes and say pretentious shit.

not going to tell someone they have to do a cartwheel because some incredibly rich people have raised their kids to talk like new age cult leaders, but like, if this gets you frothing than don't go a beverly hills grocery store, you'll choke on your tongue

bless their pretentious hearts

WILLOW: I went to school for one year. It was the best experience but the worst experience. The best experience because I was, like, “Oh, now I know why kids are so depressed.” But it was the worst experience because I was depressed.

like that interview makes one wonder if jaden and willow are twin aspects of the buddha returned or at least if they think there's a good likelihood of that being true
and with agency, what is the difference
om mani padme hum

First of all, if anyone thinks I am singling out the Smith clan for occupying too much cultural space because they are black, and that by implication I have a problem with black people occupying cultural space in general then just come out and say it. Let's have that argument/discussion/whatever. I think that's ridiculous and my posting history on this board reflects that but if someone else thinks otherwise then by all means school me on it.

That being said, speaking for myself I hate dynasties in general, be they of the political, cultural or royal stripe, but this thread is about the Smith's kid(s), so I posted about them. We can talk about the Osbournes or Miley or whoever else if people think that's warranted but rest assured I find them equally loathsome. And not just on a flaunting privelege level but also on a "damn that is some shitty parenting" level, cuz what the parents are usually doing in these situations is setting their kids up for a life under the media microscope where all their awkward teenage lashing-out and experimenting more often than not results in a rehab visit/reality TV show. They raise children with an insane level of entitlement and lack of perspective and then the kids go off the rails once they start exploring what it means to be an adult and hooray lucky us the public gets to be endlessly subjected to it, presented to us as "entertainment". The Smiths are not alone in doing this by any means - altho tbf I do think Will has taken it kind of to a next level with Jaden's movie "career", I am a little at a loss to think of another action star who has tried so hard/invested so much in pushing his kid's career and tying it so explicitly to his own.

so sayeth this cranky old man

None of what they are talking about sounds very much like Scientology jargon tbh.

More like good old-fashioned common sense.

― Sonic Dieways (latebloomer), Monday, November 17, 2014 11:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this is exactly what scientology's child curriculum is like, "let's use common sense to build everything up from base principles"

these kids are pretty entertaining, though. I like the concept of Willow and Jaden.

the jaden album is pretty enjoyable boom bap via based god stuff tbh

Personally, I agree that Will Smith pushing the 100m creation of a sci-fi metaphor for passing the movie star torch to his son is exceptional madness, and considering the family's history with scientology (google "new village leadership academy") "these kids are trip!" is arguably a glib assessment of the situation.

However, if you find yourself regularly pleading with ilx to give you the benefit of the doubt that your bile is devoid of sexism/racism/etc maybe you should consider how you've been expressing that bile

"these kids are a trip!" i mean

I love when this thread refers to these individuals as "The Smiths"

Bel Air, Here We Come

willow be on some osho shit

Girlfriends in a Coma Ain't Nothin' But Trouble

willow and jaden's celebrity/privilege is a red herring imo, teenagers of all backgrounds can be pretentious in exactly this way

but remarkably few can then go out and buy a life that matches those pretentions

i'm as KILL THE RICH philosophically as anyone but i find it very hard to get annoyed by celebrities compared to other rich people

since we've had some thread crossover, The Smiths (lol) weren't content to do this to only their own kids

http://tonyortega.org/2013/11/18/exclusive-first-interview-with-the-principal-of-will-jada-smiths-shuttered-scientology-school/

i'm as KILL THE RICH philosophically as anyone but i find it very hard to get annoyed by celebrities compared to other rich people

...

love yr bread and circuses do ya

i'd really read that interview with their teacher before assuming these guys are just lit magazine types with millions falling out of their pockets

Former Scientology official Claire Headley has helped us understand the three basic concepts of Study Technology in our series, “Up the Bridge.” We can quickly summarize them. Hubbard believed that students had problems primarily because they skipped over words they didn’t fully understand. So at the heart of Study Tech is the “misunderstood word” or MU, which is solved by meticulously looking up chains of words in dictionaries, called “word clearing.” Second, Hubbard felt that students missed concepts because they were too abstract. He solved this by requiring a lot of modeling in clay and other materials. And third, Hubbard said learning had to happen on a gradient, meaning that advanced concepts can’t be understood until many intermediate steps are introduced first.

In our discussions with Claire, it became obvious that although these ideas appear somewhat like common sense, Scientology takes them to extremes, so that students spend huge amounts of time looking up small words like “an” or “the,” and hours go into making clay models of simple ideas.

...

“It could have been a great school. But they were so vigilant about the Scientology aspect of it. In a fourth grade class, they were reading a first-grade text because they were so worried about the kids running into a misunderstood word. If a couple of kids got into a scuffle at recess, that also had to be the result of a misunderstood word,” she says. “It was so dull. The teachers were so bogged down following these rules, but that’s what Will and Jada wanted.”

up-the-bridge corner

willow and jaden's celebrity/privilege is a red herring imo, teenagers of all backgrounds can be pretentious in exactly this way

― lex pretend, Tuesday, November 18, 2014 11:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you only care about them because they are celebrities tho

pretending like this stuff is garden-variety teenager speak is ignoring a good deal of what's going on here

Don't be an SP.

I have no real knowledge of the Scientology connections underlining their comments here, so I can only go on how strange these things do or don't sound on their own. As someone who works with teenagers regularly, a lot of this wouldn't make my top 5 of weirdest shit I've heard teenagers earnestly say.

I once was a teenager who went to a school with other teenagers, and if someone had said " I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist" i would have found that quite odd.

I certainly wouldn't have.

i read this to my girlfriend and she said "yeah, that sounds like the weird shit i would say in middle school."

it's possible i've forgotten about all the hall locker chatter about duality consciousness, prana energy and how driver's ed obviously isn't helping if everyone's having accidents

I once was a teenager who went to a school with other teenagers, and if someone had said " I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist" i would have found that quite odd.

― da croupier, Tuesday, November 18, 2014 12:37 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can't admit things like this in public! you will be weaponized by the government if they find out!

haha the last thing is actually the closest thing to normal idiot teenager talk of like everything he says