Should we declare "being an actor" a mental illness - or just make it an arrestable offence? In Geena Davis's case, probably both

As you read the opening paragraphs from this bizarre story on the excellent Heat Street site, try to keep in mind that IT IS NOT A PARODY! This is an actual example of just how demented Hollywood social justice warriors now are:

Hollywood actress Geena Davis is pioneering software that will monitor and rate films and TV show for their diversity content.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is collaborating with Google and the University of Southern California School of Engineering to screen how much women and people of color are represented on film. The new software, which is being launched later this month, will scan content and scripts to supply diversity scores for movies and TV shows...

...The software will be trialed at the 2017 Bentonville Film  Festival, run by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which openly seeks to increase diversity in film... Films selected for Davis’s Bentonville Film festival will be those which have a high diversity ranking according to the software. Officials with the festival will analyze whether the more diverse films fare better with judges and audiences, and hope to make the point that diversity on film can be good business.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media??? No, honestly - it's a thing. Its motto is "if she can see it, she can be it". You can find it here.

Ms Davis's once highly successful acting career disappeared down the crapper many moons ago, helped by her starring role in 1995's notorious money-losing turkey, Cutthroat Island, in which she played the captain of a pirate ship, thereby defying gender stereotyping in films: it lost $90m at the box-office (unadjusted for inflation) and led to the closure of Carolco Pictures. Which probably explains Geena's obsession with gender in movies.

Nevertheless, I reckon she might be on to something with her new politically correct wheeze. After all, how many us decide to watch a film solely based on whether it belongs to a genre we generally enjoy, whether it had good reviews, whether we like the main actors, and whether the clips looked good? Not me - that's for sure. If it's a war film or a film about professional boxing, for instance, I always check the cast list on iMDB beforehand to satisfy myself that there aren't more men than women in it. Similarly, if it's a Scandinavian crime movie or a fantasy epic set in some mythical snow-bound realm, I'll reject it if at least half the characters aren't black or Asian. And if it's an American cop movie and the police chief isn't a harassed, overweight black man and the mayor isn't a wise and wise-cracking black woman, I'm not touching it - after all, why should I waste my time watching deliberately racist propaganda?

Presumably Ms Davis's software programme is able to measure how many of the characters are disabled, otherwise she might leave herself open to the accusation that she's deliberately discriminating against them. And if it isn't able to identify members of the sorely-oppressed LGBTI community (the "I" is for "intersex", in case you were wondering), there are bound to be mass walk-outs, wide-spread picketing and generalised hissy-fitting.

Why doesn't Donald Trump suggest building a heavily-policed security wall around Southern California to protect the rest of his country from thespian fruit-loops? And he should make sure this terrifying woman - whose presidential campaign seems heavily dependent on the support of goofy, addle-pated movie stars - is contained within the isolated area: