Hmm... I was only a child, but I find it odd that I seem to remember a big threat in the 90's when you don't. While foreign terrorism became this last decade's target, the 90's was all about domestic terror. Between the Waco massacre, the OKC bombings, Columbine, and the texas 7 breakout, I can't remember very many times of my childhood when my teachers weren't scaring us into a dark corner at the prospect of psychos with assault rifles breaking down the doors and murdering everyone at the school, including the small whimpering children. That isn't really hyperbole either, my teachers were the complete counter-point to the prospect of rationalism.

As for the actual point of the video, I do agree. There are so many people that claim that political correctness is destroying this country or destroy the UK when they're really just pissed off that they aren't allowed to be racist bigots. I do find many cases of political correctness to be quite asinine (just look up what George Carlin had to say on it and you'll see what I'm talking about), but not in a cases where people are just trying to be nasty to one another.

Ashoten:
O dang I just had another thought. A couple months ago I finally got on itunes and bought several of H.P. Lovecraft stories collected into audio books.(I retain information better if I can hear it). I loved the stories and see why they get the praise they do from geek culture. I also remember thinking and commenting to my friends that some of the language was dated and could be easily misinterpreted as racist. Particularly some of the terminology used to discuss tribes of people in distant lands. This is maybe similar to what you were talking about with the Tom Sawyer book being updated. I hate to think how someone might butcher H.P.s stuff if they tried to make it "PC". The olden time terminology is part of the mystique of the whole thing for me.

I completely agree and wish to add the great Robert E. Howard's name to the list of authors that would be positively RUINED by making their work PC.

awesomeClaw:
(This has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but i feel i should bring this up. Sexual harassment is one of the most stupid laws ever, since itīs the VICTIM who defines the crime, and not a third-person/book. For example, whistling may be for some women completly acceptable and maybe even flattering, but for other, IT`S SEXUAL HARASSMENT. Laws need to be clearly defined, not be defined by the victim.)

This is true...considering women will call sexual harassment if a guy looks at them when they're wearing a shirt with half their tits popping out and a miniskirt low enough to show off their butt.

As to the video bob...love it...you make an extremely valid and poignant point...after all political correctness in and of itself is a hard to define notion.

A bit weak man......... PC is used by the jerks not by the people who want to tell the jerks what reality is.

Politically correct is the ability to be offended by anything....

Also Jeff Dummham is funny.... you are not...least not all the time. ^_~

conflictofinterests:

spectrenihlus:

jmarquiso:

616 Nick Fury is still good ol' white Howling Commando's Nick Fury. The Ultimate Universe, which the movies draw heavily from, created a different sort of war vet for their Nick Fury. Different universes and easily separable.

True but that still doesn't explain why every single subsequent interpretation of Nick Fury has been black.

Wolverine and the X-men-black

Iron Man: Armored Adventures-black

Super Hero Squad-black

Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes-black

I just feel it is disingenuous to the original material to do this. If they really wanted a black character they should have made someone original for that purpose not change the race of an existing character.

Seems to me like it might have been an easy route to travel to get some diversity in the cast. How many other black people were in them? How easy would it have been to add a token black character and not make it seem like racism/pandering?

Nick Fury is the leader of S.H.I.E.L.D. it is made out of hundreds of agents. They could have easily given him a subordinate/second in command who just happens to be black. Yes turning Nick Fury black was a way to increase diversity but I doubt that he will ever be white again. Like I said just take the Green Lantern example, people got upset that the titular character was being played by Ryan Renolds because the only previous experience they had with a Green Lantern was with John Stewart in the Justice League cartoons.

Sargon of Akkad:

BobDobolina:

Why the hell not? He's a deity, they're inherently malleable entitites that can be reinvented to suit the era; it was routine to translate them to suit new locales in the ancient world, why wouldn't it be in the modern one? The Judaeo-Christian God has been played by everyone from Morgan Freeman to Leslie Nielsen to Tim Curry to Alanis Morrissette.

Because it doesn't make any god-damned sense.

Yahweh is perfectly portrayable as any kind of human being, dove or burning bush because of the insubstantial nature of the character in question. He has no form, he has no physical representations (shut it, Christians), and he does not physically exist, but is an entirely mental construct.

Non-Judaeo-Christian Gods are not 'inherently malleable'.

Sure they are. Especially when they're appearing in a comic book movie, say, where they're being only loosely borrowed and interpreted as characters, because new fictions structure their mythology as they see fit. If a Heimdall appearing in something claiming to be an adaptation of the Prose Edda showed up looking a modern London chav, you'd have more of a point. When Norse gods show up in a Neil Gaiman novel looking nothing like their traditional selves, it has no bearing on anything; their adaptation to the new setting is organically part of the story.

Bitching about the ethnic nuance of characters in a bloody Marvel Comics movie adaptation simply means you've become everything you once hated and thought was stupid and ill-informed about the worst excesses of "PC." It's nothing more elegant or more interesting than that.

While syncretic religion was a common practice in the ancient world, that doesn't mean it operates in a PC vacuum.

And I don't believe even you know what "PC vaccuum" means. Deities were routinely adapted in the ancient world to look like people in the places they were being worshiped. This had zilch to do with their gold teeth or family trees. Zero. Nothing. The ancients did not give a shit about the two matching up, they were not concerned about "realism."

And of course they weren't concerned about the threat the status of Norse gods as symbols of white racialism either, because that didn't exist then but is the driving force behind most of this bullshit now. Not yours of course. I'm sure your bullshit is totally different.

Hmm...makes me reconsider some things.

Well said, Bob.

craddoke:

BobDobolina:
Mmmmm, the last sentence applies to lots of PA's would-be "supporters" or the dicks from 4chan who jumped in, not really to PA themselves. They were tone-deaf and naive at some points but were actually not that unreasonable.

Good point about non-PA defenders/agitators, they were certainly the most grievous offenders. However, I'm fairly certain that a quicker and more sensitive response from PA themselves - and a stronger signal to those rogue elements to reign in their excesses - would have made the situation better. My point is that their misguided stand against "political correctness" helped prevent that from happening.

I don't think they were really taking such a stand... they just didn't fully understand what was happening until it had blown up. And Mike -- anxiety disorders and gamer tunnel-vision and all -- is obviously about the worst choice ever for dealing with the public in cases like this, they obviously need some sort of procedure or PR guy or something.

There is another thing as well. I do agree with you most of the time Bob but in this you seem to be saying that making fun of ANY kind of racial or religious issue is a low blow. But back in your Escape to the Movies review of Four Lions, didn't you praise what they had achieve by umm... DOING EXACTLY THAT?

I don't want to cause a war, but I still maintain that there are such things as funny racist/sexist jokes, for every race and each gender. True, most of them are just dumb, but I've heard some that not only made me laugh, but people of the race/gender that they were supposedly offending. If someone was offended, I wouldn't call them PC, but I would call them over sensitive. How can we ever live in a society of equality if we're all too scared of making such jokes for fear of offending or backlash? I'm not trying to be some hero, I know that the jokes are rude and maybe that makes me a dick, but whatever.

I do hate it when pricks use the whole "you're just PC" defense though.

This would be the second video of the series that's caused me to "raise an eyebrow" intellectually, as in doubt the credibility of the statements being made.

While you bring up the point of shielding offensive statements with "hurr durr PC police", you fail to bring up the point of equally offensive statements against straight white males.

For sample reference, just imagine a few stereotypes of men you can draw from this article I found from a quick google search for "men facts" http://ifaq.wap.org/sex/50factsaboutmen.html
EDIT: Linking did not work, will keep the address up until I figure it out.

EDIT2: Also, there's a couple of female stereotypes as well. But it doesn't take much thought to figure that out.

le picklez:
you fail to bring up the point of equally offensive statements against straight white males.

Awwww. Will nobody think of the straight white males? They've had it so darned rough.

Let me see if I can find a violin small enough. Might take a minute...

...And this is the last one of these I'm watching. Bob's self-righteous acid spitting is just too much to take at points. People are too sensitive now to laugh at themselves anymore. Bob is bigoted against bigots.

jmarquiso:

No, no it isn't and I agree with you here.

Universities should be open forums for free speech and free thought - and SOME of that is accepting the consequences of what you say. If you say something that a lot of people don't like, expect backlash. Don't blame the PC Police if you get it.

OR

You can learn from it. Listen to what is said honestly, and react. Like what you planned to do in the Q & A session. It was a great response.

I should've also mentioned that I have no problem with protesting Coulter, that's completely fine, but making sure that no one can get into the building by blocking the door (I was violently pushed back when I tried to enter) as well as their other chaotic actions are completely irresponsible and very morally questionable. Responding to someone speaking with acts and threats of violence, no matter how minor, makes you the bad person, not them. Morality ends where the barrel of a gun begins.

Also, my comment on politically correctness being applied too broadly was more in response to the fact that the protesters had no idea what she was going to speak about but still wanted to surpress her. Their basic logic was that because she's said questionable things in the past, it's therefore fine to assume that her discussion will be 'hate speech'. I'm not a fan of assumptions, and thus I don't think that 'hate speech' logic can be applied to her statements until she actually says them. Figured I should clear that up.

Therumancer:

Well, no point is going to have everyone agreeing with it. Like a lot of things I post, some people wind up agreeing with me, but given the political leanings of most here the majority don't. This really is Bob's crowd so to speak.

To me, you seen to illustrate a big part of the problem with political correctness, and of course you believe what your saying. If there weren't a lot of people like you, there wouldn't be arguements like this taking place.

When you get down to it, our disagreement is largely going to come down to the specifics of incidents. For example I do not believe there is any real "American Bloodlust against Muslims", though truthfully I think it would be a good thing if there was as you might gather from a lot of my other posts on the subject.

In the end as I see things the problem is the muslim culture throughout the Middle Eastern geographic region. These problems have existed for a very long time, going back to when I was a little kid, and probably beforehand. A lot of the things the politically correct use to claim our actions in the region are unjust, were actually attempts at a measured response. Rather than invading we tried to work with the various leaders in the region, including dictators to stop the violence that way. Backing guys like Saddam Hussein was done to back one of the more progressive factions in the region, in hopes that they could balance out countries like Iran without us having to invade, and perhaps even plant the seens of a renaissance of sorts in the region. The ultimate failure of these kinds of actions in the region, along with general diplomacy, is exactly why I think bigotry against the region is not a bad thing. Right now people want to try and convince themselves that we're dealing with a radical fringe within the culture, and that most of the people want change and progress, when that really isn't true. One of our big difficulties is that progressive leaders that want to reform these societies, or even just work with us, usually wind up facing rebellions. Pakistan is a good recent example, where the goverment was on our side, but the people themselves were not and turned on their own leadership because the people themselves support the terrorists and what they stand for. We also see it in Iraq or Afghanistan where after toppling the goverments and giving the people a chance to set new laws and policies, they don't even try for the seeds of progress, declare their nations "Islamic", and ultimatly kill every ambition of progress we had through the region. We wanted women's sufferage throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, but the people themselves refused to even plant the seeds of it, and right now in meetings our women who hold positions of authority are forced to wear the traditional heavy robes and pretend to defer to men.

As I see thing it's the tolerance of the region and it's behaviors, that has lead to problems getting this far, and the continued threat. Of course a lot of it is also that changing anything in the region is going to involve actions defined by the UN as Genocide (since by their own very PC logic, we should preserve things that want to kill us). Nobody wants to go to war, or put that much blood on their hands (even I don't exactly revel in the thought despite the points I make), and political correctness and messages of tolerance provide a conveinent way of avoiding reality while claiming to be involved in some kind of maligned moral crusade.

See, it's easy to say "we deserve this for supporting the dictators", but who is going to wind up in charge of these countries if they are gone? Chances are for all pretensions of freedom, it will be another dictator, another group of theocrats, or whomever which is liable to have a very anti-western agenda since in many cases it's support of us that has caused a lot of discontent to begin with. It's like how in Egypt there really isn't any clear replacement for the leader they are removing, all you see are people who just want that guy gone. The biggest faction (which are not the overall majority there at least) being hard core Islamics who want to turn it into an Islamic nation run under Islamic law. None of the groups there seem to really want any kind of truely progressive goverment, and really all the options that seem viable are worse than the dictator they got rid of, or constant civil war. The tradgedy of the situation being that there is no real solution.

I'll also say that a big part of political correctness in situations like this is the attitude that for whatever reason it's wrong for the US to pursue it's own interests, but not for other nations to pursue theirs even when they conflict with us. In a lot of conflicts, as I frequently say, the issue is "us or them" right and wrong isn't a part of it. They pursue their agenda with what they have, we pursue ours, just because we're a big country and liable to win (easily) doesn't mean that I feel it's somehow wrong. Of course then again a lot of the opposition typically comes down to people not wanting to actually have to do anything, given that they are fat, happy, and content. Nobody wants to head out to war, or see their loved ones do so, and whether or not it's right in the big picture nobody wants to look at burning cities and millions of dead civilians and think "we did that" (unless they are a total sociopath).

I doubt we're going to agree here, but the point is that I say bigotry is good because you need to single out problems and address them. In most cases political correctness amounts to a problem being too big, or too morally ambigious, for people to want to deal with. They would rather not do anything, take what they see as a moral high ground (even if it's not), and hope for a magical solution than take any kind of action. To be honest a lot of those failed attempts in situations like the ongoing Middle East crisis, are the result of political correctness. We backed dictators like Saddam hoping that with our help the region would progress, and our assistance would convince them we weren't the enemy. With the majority of people being anti-western (not a fringe minority) we wanted to avoid going into places like Iran directly because of this, and instead were trying to help Muslims sort it all out themselves. Failed attempts like this made things worse, and honestly, the situations I propose are extreme (even if they would help with global overpopulation) but truthfuly I think if we had acted more directly decades ago the situation wouldn't currently be so
messed up.

In the end though we are going to have to agree to disagree. I actually do believe in trying tolerance, and diplomacy first, but there is a point where you have to admit that it's not working, and start singling groups of people out and take action, even drastic action if you want anything to change.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The problems didn't start when you were a kid. The problems started when the Middle East was being colonized by countries not from the Middle east. This is oooooooooold shit here. Democracy is a bad word in a lot of people's minds there because democracies typically screwed them over. The truth of the matter is, long, long ago our ancestors didn't try diplomacy first, and we're stuck holding the bag of "They're going to hate us and perhaps try to screw us over while we try to earn back their trust or we could continue along the undiplomatic route for a while longer, keeping us safe in the short term but building up more hatred in the long run"

That being the case, the West is shaping up to come in behind a few key places in terms of power sometime soon, and if the rules of engagement end up being more like our ancestors' we stand a good chance of being screwed, and HARD. Options to avoid this stand, in my mind, as a) Get a lot better at war, STAT, and b) Get a lot better at diplomacy, STAT. I'd go with diplomacy, because brute force has a way of failing at the least opportune moments.

For once again expressing something I thought, but couldn't quite express:

Thank you Bob.

I agree. I agree so very, very much.

Undead Dragon King:
People are too sensitive now to laugh at themselves anymore.

Especially the bigots, amirite? (And may I suggest "Bob is bigoted against bigots" is not quite the burn you were looking for. Doubt he's going to lose sleep over that one.)

BobDobolina:

Sure they are. Especially when they're appearing in a comic book movie, say, where they're being only loosely borrowed and interpreted as characters, because new fictions structure their mythology as they see fit. If a Heimdall appearing in something claiming to be an adaptation of the Prose Edda showed up looking a modern London chav, you'd have more of a point. When Norse gods show up in a Neil Gaiman novel looking nothing like their traditional selves, it has no bearing on anything; their adaptation to the new setting is organically part of the story.

Actually it is the words 'Norse Gods' that is the problem here. If you wanted 'American Gods', as in the novel, then invent them. It's easy and fun. I'm not saying that adaptations can't be good and that having Thor as a world-champion WE wrestler wouldn't be awesome, but I'm saying it should be played by someone who at least bares some kind of resemblance to Thor, otherwise, why even call it Thor? Why not use an African god of thunder instead?

BobDobolina:
Bitching about the ethnic nuance of characters in a bloody Marvel Comics movie adaptation simply means you've become everything you once hated and thought was stupid and ill-informed about the worst excesses of "PC." It's nothing more elegant or more interesting than that.

I'm afraid it is, even if you don't see or believe it. My issue, if you'd read my original post, is to do with verisimilitude - the realism and relevancy of the piece concerning its content. If you portray a preexisting and clearly-defined black character as white, a tall character as short or a smart character as dumb, it ruins the adaptation and spoils it for me entirely.

The whole exercise becomes pointless as you've just made up characteristics for a character that did not otherwise have them, and if you are so concerned about diversity then you should have just made up a character to fit the need, rather than bastardise an existing one.

BobDobolina:
And I don't believe even you know what "PC vaccuum" means.

I don't care.

BobDobolina:
Deities were routinely adapted in the ancient world to look like people in the places they were being worshiped. This had zilch to do with their gold teeth or family trees. Zero. Nothing. The ancients did not give a shit about the two matching up, they were not concerned about "realism."

Realism to the ancients was incredibly important and died out as time progressed. Look at Byzantine icons compared to Classical Greek statues. Please compare the Dying Gaul to the Bayeux tapestry.

What is your understanding of syncretic religion? It does not mean, as the Greeks did with Adonis, adopting a god from a foreign culture and making it your own. It means comparing the roles of those gods in each respective pantheon and associating them together to understand them. This does not mean that Baal and Zeus were the same god, merely that they held the same spot in their respective pantheons. Their 'backstories' were not the same, and nobody claimed that they should be.

BobDobolina:
And of course they weren't concerned about the threat the status of Norse gods as symbols of white racialism either,

This is not, and has never been, the issue I am debating over. Please do not try to drag red herrings into this. Racialism of any kind is not what we're talking about, and if you think we are, you're wrong.

BobDobolina:
because that didn't exist then but is the driving force behind most of this bullshit now. Not yours of course. I'm sure your bullshit is totally different.

And well done for ending on a particularly sarcastic and disrespectful note. I don't recall attacking you with ad-homs, I recall debating with you as an intellectual equal and grown adult.

Fantastic, I enjoyed this a lot. I agree wholeheartedly

jmarquiso:

spectrenihlus:

jmarquiso:

616 Nick Fury is still good ol' white Howling Commando's Nick Fury. The Ultimate Universe, which the movies draw heavily from, created a different sort of war vet for their Nick Fury. Different universes and easily separable.

True but that still doesn't explain why every single subsequent interpretation of Nick Fury has been black.

Wolverine and the X-men-black

Iron Man: Armored Adventures-black

Super Hero Squad-black

Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes-black

I just feel it is disingenuous to the original material to do this. If they really wanted a black character they should have made someone original for that purpose not change the race of an existing character.

Why? How does Nick Fury function as a character in these universes? SHIELD leader, superspy, etc? Why does it matter if he is or isn't black in this case? Does he function as Super-spy WWII vet?

Because if he did, and we were being pure about it, he's extremely f-cking old.

If it is in his origin then yes he should. And since his origin is that of a ww2 super spy that should be included. Unfortunately the soldiers of ww2 were segregated so Nick Fury could not have been black.

I think this seriously needs to be brought up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybi64lRvzDk

It's naive to say there is no such thing as oppression between races and genders, but it is just as naive to assume everyone on the other side as you are all the perpetrators of that oppression.

That's what bothers me.

HankMan:
Seemed a little more aggravated than usual this week Bob.

^This, wondering if it was "faked" for show purposes or real.

Anyway, sorry, but I think PC is bullshit. Not in itself, but as it's protection most often used these days. Personally, I view everyone equally insultable. I'm not gonna insult you because you're black/gay/whatever, but I am not going to stop in my tracks with a joke or whatever if I would've otherwise used it (or it's equal-value joke/insult) if you were a member of the proud heterosexual white race. In fact, I consider anyone doing so to be just condescending and a hypocrite considering the political correctness is supposed to be about equality.

The major reason I call out political correctness when I see it is not that I'm trying to hide behind a shield, it's because people use it as a justification for things that they determine are 'right'. PIC is not an impenetrable fortress to use against the attacks of the League of Culturally Empathetic and Sensitive Persons, it's a counter-argument for what basically amounts to a tautology. Why is it discriminatory to call a black person black? 'Because it is'. No reason. No justification. Just a label as 'insensitive' if you disagree. It's the worst kind of social engineering; the kind that forces out an opinion simply because somebody with a Messiah complex feels it is wrong.

Case in point: Black people in America have the famous moniker "African-American". I've heard this term applied to German black people who were on vacation in the Bahamas. They have never set foot in the US, yet people call them African-American because 'black' is 'wrong'. Similarly, whenever I fill out a survey or census sheet, I have to list myself as 'Caucasian'. The last time any of my known relatives lived in the Caucasus Mountains was when man migrated into Europe from Asia. My ancestry, racially speaking, is mostly German, Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian, and Swiss. If anything, I'm 'North/Central European', not 'Caucasian'. These are definitions of Caucasian, both from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary website:

"Of or relating to the Caucasus or its inhabitants"

"Of, constituting, or characteristic of a race of humankind native to Europe, North Africa, and southwest Asia and classified according to physical features"

So why are all white people, of which there is a staggering variety, lumped together in something more closely related to Turkish or Persian than the central, western, and northern European descents that dominate the American population? So 'black' can be re-termed 'African-American'.

The only black African I ever met was very insistent that he was Hutu, not African-American. It's a big fallacy to generalize such a large and diverse population like that, anyway. Algerians and Ethiopians are both from Africa. Why are Algerians not labeled African-American? Because it doesn't actually refer to American citizens, citizens-to-be, or otherwise residents of America who are ancestrally African. It's a substitute word for 'black', and we know it. Otherwise Algerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Egyptians, and all other lighter-skinned North African races would be African-American as well.

The diversity among actual racial origin is absolutely fascinating. There are so many experiences unique to a single race that we squander because we feel the need to lump everyone together in dubiously-accurate geographical representations of race. Where did the 21-gun salute come from? The Zulus. Where did St. Patrick's Day come from? The Irish. Who made the first pizza? The Italians. Where does modern military strategy originate? China. The list goes on and on and on and on. If anything, our definitions of race should become more precise to celebrate each race the way they deserve.

'African-American', 'Caucasian', 'Asian', 'Latino', and so forth are bland, meaningless terms that sap us of our individual identities in the interest of making everyone identical. Having grown up in a white-bread suburb, I can say for certain that a homogeneous population is about the most boring thing I can think of. Every culture and every race has something that they contributed to modern society. Why do we insist on diluting this to its basest, blandest form? The concept of a melting pot has been completely destroyed by the idea of 'political correctness'. Identity should be a source of personal pride. You want to move society to a point where political correctness (or lack of it) is the modus operandi for everyone? Then stop defining 'equal' as 'identical'.

Now, there are plenty of incidences where PIC is used as a shield. Those are holding back society as much as when PC is a tautology cover-up. The entire idea is flawed, no matter what side you're on. The only way to go about it is to try to run the center course. If someone calls a black man a 'n****r' and then calls you PC for being insulted, then he's clearly in the wrong. If someone is upset when you say 'Columbian, not Latino', they're just as much an obstacle as the first person.

All the examples listed apply to race, but the concept applies to everything. Men and women are clearly unique, as thousands of years of miscommunication demonstrate. Why try to force two fundamentally different groups into the same mindset? It doesn't work and encourages bitterness between men and women. Trying to use the same approach for all races, sexes, and ages is like trying to fix all the problems on a broken-down car using only a screwdriver. No tool is inherently superior, and no problem is less worthy of attention. We've accepted that viewpoint into every part of our existence except the most important part of all.

I found Jeff Dunham VERY funny when I first saw his show, but mind you, I'm a European, and an Eastern European to match, so I didn't think of it as offensive at all. He's taking stereotypes, and gives them a strong comedic overtone. I can see how the lazy Jalapeno Pepper may be a bit of a kick in the gnads, but Ahmed, the Dead Terrorist? Isn't that just a way to make reality less scary? It's a long known defensive mechanism - you ridicule what you find terrifying to make it more manageable.

I mean, if so many people around the world laugh at the guy, can he really be that bad? I know that people are generally stupid assholes, but compare Dunham to that 'He's a ni**er' guy, who ended his career with one outburst. And NOBODY in the entire theatre laughed at that 'joke' of his.

I have never really had to deal with this issue so I am kinda at a loss of what the hells going on.

One of your best vids!
Well spoken.

Angry Bob is angry

Sargon of Akkad:

BobDobolina:
And of course they weren't concerned about the threat the status of Norse gods as symbols of white racialism either,

This is not, and has never been, the issue I am debating over.

Okay, that was a bit of a low blow, I'll cop to it. Sorry.

Actually it is the words 'Norse Gods' that is the problem here.

No, it's only a problem if you believe "Norse Gods" are a purely ethnic property in a way that other gods are not. There is no particular reason for that belief and no need for writers of fiction to subscribe to it. If you want to adapt the Norse Gods a capable of taking on different forms and appearances, but still want to make use of some of their traits and narratives, do so. Same with Nigerian orishas or Hindu gods or Japanese gods or Native American spirits. What matters is the integrity of the story, not some irrelevant ethnic 'verisimilitude;' if it works on its own terms it doesn't have to be answerable to what the chronologically earliest depiction 'looked like.'

Comics don't often answer to quite so noble a standard, of course, but if you know anything about them you should know that this:

I'm afraid it is, even if you don't see or believe it. My issue, if you'd read my original post, is to do with verisimilitude - the realism and relevancy of the piece concerning its content.

... is a comical thing to say. Complaining to Marvel comics about the "verisimilitude" of their adaptation of any deity is just dumb; when has that ever been a concern of comics?

Realism to the ancients was incredibly important and died out as time progressed. Look at Byzantine icons compared to Classical Greek statues. Please compare the Dying Gaul to the Bayeux tapestry.

"Naturalism" in scuplture had nothing to do with "realism." "Realism" as you mean it is carefully comparing things to their original ethnic contexts because for some reason this is important to you with the depiction of deities. The ancients had plenty of naturalism, they simply did not give a shit about realism. Your complaint about "verisimilitude" would have made zero sense to them.

What is your understanding of syncretic religion? It does not mean, as the Greeks did with Adonis, adopting a god from a foreign culture and making it your own. It means comparing the roles of those gods in each respective pantheon and associating them together to understand them.

Straight imports and comparison were both practised widely. In the case of imports, the ancients were not concerned with the ethnic "verisimilitude" of appearance. The representations might carry forward one or two key identifying characteristics: Mithras' origin is hinted at by his Phrygian cap, but Roman artists otherwise were unconcerned with whether he looked Phrygian if indeed such artists ever had cause to lay eyes on someone from Phrygia.

This should be no shock. Representations of Jesus follow similar patterns. He looks Syrian in early paintings, Italian or European in paintings from the Renaissance, black in Ethiopia, Asian in Korea. It's a perfectly normal thing for artists to do.

Uhhh....for 3/4's of the way, I was right behind you. I don't know when I stopped walking beside you, but I guess it was when we got into blame-throwing.

Gay doesn't mean homosexual. It originally meant happy. ("We'll have a gay old time"- The Flintstones)
Man doesn't refer to guys, it refers to Homo, as in Homo Sapiens. There's isn't a Hetero Sapiens or a Wohomo/Feminae Sapiens.
African people were sold as slaves, referred to by the N word, and it was often by other Africans. Not by Whitey. Which isn't racist(?). Cracker or Coon are equally racist but only in their relative countries.
Spastic is horribly offensive over here (Not so in America), while we still all use the cross-eyed "Derp" epithet to refer to someone with mental shortcomings - making fun of those that actually have them in ailments like Downes Syndrome.

See, here's the problem with the PC movement: Big White Corporate-land (Which doesn't include you or me, and never will unless we've got family in there) has decided that words like Golliwog and Faggot are offensive - not because they have a deep meaning of antagonism, but that they've been used to antagonise in the past.
(OED: a soft doll with bright clothes, a black face, and fuzzy hair / a ball or roll of seasoned chopped liver, baked or fried. )

We've been utter assholes in the past, and there's some of us that are still assholes in the present; but it's hugely dangerous to start limiting speech purely from when "Haters are gonna Hate".

It's one of the main reasons I like the Escapist. I can say fuck when I need to. I can write 455 without the swear-checker jumping on it. I understand that there are people out there who just want to potty-mouth the whole day long, but like DRM, there's always a way around it. And also like DRM, innocent consumers are caught up in the fight between Corporateland and Anarchyland.

Would I ever use the N word to a black guy? No. That would be rude.
Would I describe him as an African-American? No. FOR THE SAME REASON. I don't know where his family came from.

Political Correctness is a toxic point because it subtly slips in new words into the vernacular, which just become as racist as the old ones; slips some out which are actually useful and descriptive (purely because they've been used in hate speech); and heralds in the wonders of Newspeak where reporting on sexcrime is doubleplusgood.

TL;DR: Stop the hatewords, not the hatelanguage.

(Oh, Achmed the Dead Terrorist? Lots of Arabians laugh their dishdasha's off at it)