domain:parrhesia.substack.com
2D3D
4m ago
This is just another instance of reputation laundering of black people by hollywood, although remarkably incompetently executed in this case. Having Yasuke be a secret Assassin mission giver/NPC makes way more sense than having him be an actual stealth assassin type. Only way that would work is if they made him the ninja and let his black skin work with the noh stagehand outfit for perfect night stealth, but that is too daring for even Ubisofts modern retardation. Having a fucking samurai in full yoroi somehow be an assassin, and leaving yasuke unmasked to emphasize his blackness has to be deliberate incompetence at this point.
In the end, hollywood and its adjacents keep making the same mistake: inserting black people into cool shit doesnt make black people cool, it makes that cool shit just shit. They fucked up with Cleopatra, they fucked up with Lord Of The Rings, and they'll fuck it up with Yasuke.
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi. The list is not exhaustive or long but surely it is better than enshittifying established cultural properties just to please some click-starved journalist doomscrolling twitter.
2D3D
17m ago
I think it is also fair to see which immigrants come to london to be treated as londe oners, as opposed to immigrants who wish londoners to treat them as migrants deserving entitlements.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FstMoM-spJU&pp=ygUeZ29vZG5lc3MgZ3JhY2lvdXMgbWUgcm9iaW5zb25z
Given the chance, some migrants would wish to remove themselves from the cultures they left behind, save for food. That they often give up midway and revert to cultural kins is a function of task difficulty on both ends of the equation rather than lack of desire. Sunak and Sajid Javid and the rotterdam mayor can make a reasonable claim to wanting to be part of the new society they found themselves in, compared to the islamists that refuse to even learn english.
In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
21m ago
Did you end up watching the series? How did you find it?
yofuckreddit
23m ago
Yeah. Even my previous, smaller house, had a next door neighbor with a lot of "advice". Two retirees with a cumulative 100 hours a week more free time than the young couple they were advising.
No_one
28m ago
I'm not. Once went on a hot/not site and got a rating of precisely 5/10 from girls. I certainly don't look like any of these stereotypically 'handsome' guys of present day like e.g. George here, or Lomez (the recently outed 'far-right' Jew ).
Looked up my face on image search, a very close match is this guy:
yofuckreddit
30m ago
A couple folks are suggesting "let it go". I get it! But a few things:
- If you lived in my neighborhood you'd be pretty reluctant to be the guy who replaced everything with a bunch of concrete padding and cut down all the trees in your yard. Standards are high - yes the boomers are at another level with their yards, but other young families are handling their shit. Mine's a bit tougher than some others unfortunately. Frankly I'm already embarrassed with how much I've let it fall off!
- The yard's a significant store of value. I suspect it cost 6 figures or more to get to this point - there are many places that can't host grass due to elevation changes + shade (where the mulch goes) and it's clear an expert designed the whole thing. If I let it go to seed it'll cost me some $ on sale.
I think the trick is going to be me just holding on for dear life, making more money somehow, and getting it right the next time.
FistfullOfCrows
44m ago
We're already there.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
52m ago
On the Fourth of July, I run in American flag shorts while listening to Rick Derringer's Real American.
But seriously, I just lack any meaningful ties to an ancestry or heritage other than American. I have British ancestors that got here 400 years ago and German ancestors that started coming in the 1800s, but pretty much none of them in the 20th century seemed to have done much to maintain any ties to the old countries. We're just a very American family and I'm good with that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
An example that immediately came to mind was Mindy Kaling's first role being writing and portraying Kelly Kapoor as a narcissist, egoist idiot mess.
2rafa
1hr ago
Rather Sunak than Jeremy Corbyn, surely? I see (and would largely agree with) your position, but for Indians especially their political distribution does not appear substantially different than that of natives, and it’s telling that in recent years (as usual) it was the ethnics in the Tory party who wanted to clamp down on immigration while the native wets were largely reticent.
2rafa
1hr ago
The church is certainly still against both gay marriage and abortion, nevertheless the official position is still more conciliatory on many of these social issues than US tradcaths are happy with.
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
Sure, I get you. My objection would be that I don't think it's fair to group Sunak with people like Yousef, Khan, Varadkar etc. But that's a relatively minor disagreement.
2rafa
1hr ago
If you bang one guy for 10 years during your twenties, while a loser male has one or two hookups but otherwise remains single and technically sexless for 8/10 of those years he still has an equal or higher body count to the woman. In this way measuring promiscuity by sexual partner count in the last year doesn’t make sense.
No_one
1hr ago
Same is thought to be true in Arab countries. They like large butts at least.
Interestingly, and this is something I'd research if I ever got better executive function, fatness might have been seen as sexually attractive in the eastern med area between at least 1000 to 1900. There's complaints of imams dated to cca 1200 that 'rich Egyptian women eat bread after dinner to get fatter, and some are so fat they pray sitting down, not kneeling'.
Two Czechs went on a car ride in 1932 to Kandahar, through Turkey. It's an interesting book- interior of Turkey was basically middle ages still, they went in a sports, not all-terrain car. However, they mention approvingly, as an aside, that fatness was just coming out of vogue in coastal Turkish cities. ???
Also heard from a friendly jewish extremists that he talks to bedouins in his area and they seem to like the 'mattress' body type - large & soft and less likely to wander around.
Folamh3
1hr ago
Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.
No_one
1hr ago
No, it's because he eats too much.
Getting used to eating huge portions isn't the same as 'having your metabolism broken'.
No_one
1hr ago
The laser-guided bomb of justice you mean.
Also, are these my culture's sacred text? I feel the only text I consider somehow sacred are Nick Land's writing and I have thankfully read only very few of them, thus preserving the little I have of my sanity.
I've never felt kinship with my nation or ethnic group. The only group I've ever felt I belonged to was my boy scout troop, before the good years there ended.
They recruited a couple untrustworthy people and I spent years scratching my head why we didn't kick the guy who would reply not instantly, like every other scout, but with a 300 ms delay. I didn't trust him from the start because of that and eventually that was proven right a couple years later.
georgioz
1hr ago
If there are Taelons 100 million ly away from us, it is highly unlikely they’d care about us.
Milky way diameter is only around 100 thousand ly, the closest Andromeda galaxy is 2,4 million ly. Even Voyager is travelling around 1 ly/18,000 yeas so it can get to the edge of the galaxy in around 900 million years. Parker Solar Probe, which is fastest moving man-made object has ten times the velocity, so it could travel to the edge of the galaxy in tens of millions of years.
Any sufficiently old civilization - let's say tens or hundreds of millions of years old - could reasonably have a probe in every star system in the Galaxy even with our current propulsion technology with no problem and it could even explore other galaxies if it is 1 billion years or older.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
It seems to me that every single one of your arguments again places a convenient cutoff point on history. The 1948 war was preceded by massive Jewish immigration into Palestinian lands, terrorism by armed groups representing it, and them leveraging their ties to the international community to secure support for plans that already amounted to mass expropriations of Palestinians; the post-WWII Germans had just finished doing WWII (and as far as I can tell the expatriate ethnically German populations were friendly with the Nazis wherever they encountered them on their drive east); presumably "fedposting" implies things that are not proportional to vaccine mandates and lockdowns (but I have to say that if anti-lockdowners created a compound where they kept loudly pro-lockdown individuals under house arrest, I would not feel like an injustice is being committed).
The particular reason why Palestinians are more entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics than these groups is that they have been subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously.
No_one
1hr ago
One of the funnier episodes of my life where the funniest outcome didn't happen was when the class bully - well, he wasn't really bullying anyone as far as I know, he was just swaggering and an asshole - tried to make me insecure about my dick size. I had no idea and probably said as much. If only had I cared then. If only. That'd have been extremely funny.
Seeing women expect 20-22cm though... Wow, that is just brutal.
They really don't. They might say it but actually 20 cm, which is 8 inches is vanishingly rare.
20 cm is 99th percentile. Or 98th. They rarely see it unless they're extra promiscuous.
Also, that long a dick size can actually hurt a typical woman bc the guy might hit her cervix during athletic sex. And even tear it, requiring a visit to ER.
The horror stories of guys getting really insecure usually involve 4 inches and under.
No_one
1hr ago
I believe it's a diminutive of Paul and Paula in Russian. Not that stereotypical esp not on English language internet. It's just rare.
Corvos
1hr ago
Of course, it happens all the time. That's why Britain refused to sign a convention on maritime warfare in the early 1900s, and why America refused to sign one preventing the use of poisonous gases. It's classic Great Power behaviour. But it seems to me that any system of law which doesn't, to some extent, allow the feeble to constrain the mighty isn't law. It's just a formalisation of raw power. As if we allowed members of parliament to opt out of rules about corruption and murder.
My original post was trying to point out, quickly and perhaps cack-handedly, that America still derives a certain amount of respect by posing as a high-minded defender of justice and that resorting to explicit threats when weaker countries try to constrain its allies damages this image. In my opinion, it would have been wiser to simply point out that the court is being inconsistent and leave it at that. America is powerful enough that it can afford to be polite.
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