That’s not necessarily either-or.

I am no cyberstalker! I just have a good memory!

Twice in the past 24 hours, I’ve had people bring up things I said in decades-old reviews that I had myself forgotten.

I am impressed by the high caliber of the cyberstalkers I’ve amassed.

Speaking of earlier centuries, I find one of your old movie reviews (Aliens in the Wild Wild West (1999)) particularly relevant when you talk about how these old affinity biases were kind of necessary for the survival of the various civilizations in which they arose. As you pointed out, the attempt to impose modern multicultural sensibilities on a late 19th century setting strained credibility to the breaking point in that movie:

Suffice it to say that the aliens are saved, in large part by the impassioned plea which Tom makes to the locals to be accepting and nonjudgmental of hairy, fierce looking aliens. Remember, these are people who wouldn’t share a bar with an African or an Indian or a Chinese laborer, but they open their hearts and decide to rub shoulders with butt-ugly aliens because a stranger kid who talks like a used-car salesman on crack tells them they oughtta.

Not that the past was as glamorous or glorious as some people like to think, but I suspect one reason a fair number of people like stories set in earlier times (like the late 19th century) and post-apocalyptic times (in which civilization usually is shown to have regressed to being something like those earlier centuries) is that they find it pretty amusing (and gratifying) to contemplate what would happen to all these virtue-signalling offenderatti these days who pretend to take the greatest umbrage and be in the highest dudgeon at the tiniest alleged transgression against their more-victim-than-thou ideology of perpetual grievance. Basically, if they didn’t get off their high horse and start thinking more realistically, the harsh realities of such times would eat them alive. As you also said in that review:

So yes, everything ends with the aliens getting off earth safely and the kids getting back to their own time safely, leaving behind one western town which has discovered the virtues of tolerance and openness and kindness. Which, I guess, explains why there’s nothing but a ghost town left in the latter end of the twentieth century. Towns like that get their asses kicked.

I think a lot of us can agree we’d much rather see these power-hungry offenderatti who profess to be our moral superiors receiving numerous such hard and well-placed kicks to their flabby (and notably rather pasty) posteriors rather than the verbal tongue-bath the cowardly and hypocritical suck-ups of modern media seem determined to give them.