HereAndGone
19d ago
"Rings of Power" got into trouble for exactly this. I'd give Queen-Regent Míriel a pass (we don't know in canon anything about her mother's family or who her mother was, and there were good Haradrim/Easterlings who interacted with the Edain, so it's not impossible that her maternal family were persons of colour) but the Hobbits, sorry, Harfoots and Stoors, were just too much. A lot of jokes about "and is the final season going to end with they get to the Shire and then there's a mass genocide where only the white Hobbits survive?" since this is meant to be prequel to the LoTR movies and that is established canon that the Hobbits are all white.
I'm waiting for season three to see how they write themselves out of all the corners they've written themselves into, but I wonder will we ever get that season three in the end?
HereAndGone
19d ago
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
HereAndGone
19d ago
I suppose, as normally used, it's "short term gains mean long term losses". Being enticed away by something that sounds good, to the point you ignore all other intervention, then you end up losing everything.
HereAndGone
19d ago
When you make deals with the Devil, do not try to welch on the deal, it never ends well.
Clearly the Piper is not an ordinary human being, and when you think about it, neither is the plague of rats. If you have a mysterious plague then hot on its heels a mysterious figure turns up offering to fix it for you, pay the goddamn gold and be glad that's all you had to hand over. The city officials were both greedy and stupid, and the entire town had to pay the price as a result.
Maybe also "government officials have always been on the take" as well.
HereAndGone
19d ago
I found you in the comments section of a Hanania tweet
That does not surprise me, now that you told us, but it does give me much more context for where Alexander is coming from.
HereAndGone
19d ago
At the same time, "someone on Twitter said" doesn't tell us much. What 'someone'? Right wing someone, left wing someone, progressive Marxist someone, Aryan supremacy someone? There's a lot of ground that "someone" covers and we don't know if the tweet, taken out of context, is supportive (I'm a liberal, told ya that reality has a liberal bias), is grudgingly supportive (I'm a tankie, liberals get the bullet too, but this once they were right), is supportive from the other side (I'm conservative, this is where we can agree with liberals), is condemnatory (I believe in the superiority of the white race as proven by HBD and the stupid liberals are trying to tar us as spreading misinformation, this is what we have to fight against) or what.
HereAndGone
19d ago
We do have a lot of Brazilians working in the meat processing industry over here (something that surprised me when I learned it). One of the GPs in the practice I attend is Spanish/Brazilian (so I guess that means Portuguese-speaking, though he went to Spain before he came to Ireland - he'd be "White Hispanic" by US census categories) and he was telling me about when he first moved here and the landlord was the 'cash in hand, no rent books, no contract' type that can kick you out in the morning.
HereAndGone
19d ago
Oh sure, but this was one case at least where "white couple adopt troubled black kid, it goes terribly wrong" wasn't about the black kid but the white couple (or one of them). A counterpoint to the "invasive species" bit. There's enough terrible things happening on both sides of adoption/fostering not to put all the blame on one set.
There's been an egregious case around fostering in Ireland recently, which finished up a decade-long investigation with what amounted to a shrug about "well we can't prove the charges of sexual abuse, so all good I guess?" even though the other details were of gross neglect and abuse. Seems like nobody did a damn thing over the years, and even when somebody wanted to, the management decided "well no we can't take the girl out of the placement because that would make us look bad". The country as a whole was seething over this, and rightly so.
HereAndGone
19d ago
Look, even human-alien hybrids are entitled to become actors if that is their calling.
HereAndGone
19d ago
I used to wonder why books sometimes had a little disclaimer on the copyright page about "the views expressed are not necessarily those of the author" because duh, of course someone can write about a thing without thinking it is a good thing (e.g. crime writers writing about serial killers).
And then this sort of literalism and inability to separate out viewpoints expressed by characters from what the author thinks came along. If it is not 21st century liberal to progressive all the way through, then clearly you are saying bad things, and clearly you only say bad things because you believe bad things, and clearly that means you are a bad person.
Though I can't blame "kids these days" for that, even if it is the most egregious examples; it happened back in the day as well. Arthur Conan Doyle had to make it clear to a review that yes, thank you very much, he was aware that he was working in the same field as Poe and Gaboriau of detective fiction, and that just because in early Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes had a poor opinion of Dupin, it did not mean that Doyle himself had a poor view:
To An Undiscerning Critic by Arthur Conan Doyle, in London Opinion (28 December 1912)
Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.
HereAndGone
19d ago
I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.
I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").
HereAndGone
19d ago
That is the point I guess, all these kids not even born forty years ago imagine they've invented Liberal Media Talking-Points on TV shows for the first time 😁
HereAndGone
19d ago
That's the problem: you get terrible landlords, and you also get terrible tenants. There are people who will take total advantage of being a tenant and just wreck the place and laugh in your face about any consequences. I don't blame people who have a house that they're renting out for spare income but are not 'professional' landlords for deciding the game is not worth the candle, and it's better to just sell the property (or keep it as inheritance for your kids).
HereAndGone
19d ago
Israel is, uh, let's move on
They seem to have now declared war on the terrorist menace that is the Catholic Church by yet another "oopsies! did we bomb that? sorry, just a mistake!"
Honestly, the amount of "oopsies, we didn't mean it!" bombings the Israeli armed forces have been doing recently, they're not really a good advertisement for them being a developed First World secular nation, now are they? Though you have to admire their cursed by luck ability to hit the only Catholic church in Gaza by complete accident, didn't mean it, had no idea it was there. Poor guys, they must just have such terrible equipment, clearly they need billions of military aid to get modern range sights so things like this won't happen again!
(Before the mods slap me around: yes, I am being heavily sarcastic in order not to be heavily enraged and start calling no-no names. That being said, let the beatings commence!).
HereAndGone
19d ago
Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.
You don't remember the hysteria about he was going to be running the gay torture camps as he set up the theocracy that Trump would oversee? The fact that he did the job quietly was much more of an achievement than you think, including hosting our gay Taoiseach and his boyfriend during St Patrick's Day visits! That, and the mockery over the Pence Rule which was really common-sense for the crazy times we're in.
I think we should be more reassured about the fact that "this guy will kill us all!" messaging of the time then turns out years afterwards to be "that guy? sure he did nothing!"
HereAndGone
19d ago
Immigration was always going to be a mess, given the Democratic Party's agenda there - they rely on the votes of immigrant citizens and being seen as the compassionate party that wants to help your cousin Manuel to come join you here, as well as all the "kids in cages" campaigning they had done, so they can't very well turn around and go "back to your side of the border, no we don't care if you drown crossing the river!"
So she pretty much was handed the poisoned chalice and no real plan as to what to do with it. On top of that, she was using her own "my family are immigrants" backstory to win votes, and she was struggling with the Copmala perception so probably wanted to soften that (nationally, being pro-law'n'order isn't a handicap, but if her ambitions were to run for Governor in California, it very much would have hampered her there).
HereAndGone
19d ago
She is ambitious, but I get the sense more in the context of California. Had Biden not decided to run for a second term, I wonder if she would have concentrated instead on running for Governor of California, as Newsom would probably then be gearing up for the presidential primary challenges?
But Biden did decide to run, and she was brought along as VP, and I imagine everyone expected either "we win and things go the same as before for a second term" or "we lose and I go for governor" and not the whole implosion and being left with no real choice but to shove Kamala out there as their candidate.
In the red corner, weighing in at also 100 pounds soaking wet, but fired up and full of energy, is the Progressive Wing of the party. The Zohran Mamdanis, the AOCs, the Deja Foxxs, the David Hoggs.
God forgive me, I nearly want this side to win the internal battle, just for the pure amusement value. The DNC had to re-do their vice chair election (and kick out Hogg) since the "three genders" vote was screwed-up. Just contemplate with me, for a moment, an electoral ballot for state and national elections that instructs the voter to pick "one of any other gender after you pick one of the male gender and one of the female gender candidates".
I think the blue corner will probably win, since they already have their hands on the levers of power, and they might just be the more sensible of the two options.
HereAndGone
19d ago
Biden was running on "I beat Trump before" and Harris was running on "I'm not Trump" plus a helping of "I'm Black and Asian and a woman". Seemingly they brought Walz in as "well those racist sexist white guys need to see a white guy to vote for" which, God Almighty, no wonder they lost; if their view of being moderate is "let's pander to the deplorables" then they really are out of touch:
With a looming deadline that Democrats concluded they had to meet to finalize their nominee, people close to Harris and outside allies began a few days before his announcement to start thinking about what her campaign might look like and started batting around names of potential running mates at daily meetings.
Almost immediately after Biden dropped out, her team concluded that it most likely had to be a middle-aged white man, for many of the reasons Barack Obama chose Biden as his running mate.
It’s not “rocket science,” said a person familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking. “Let’s just face it. There’s a lot of sexist, racist white dudes out there in America who don’t like Trump but just need a little extra validation.”
They needed “someone who gives moderate Republican voters a place to go,” said another person familiar with the process. “The Nikki Haley voters that are like, ‘God, JD Vance is terrifying and Trump is horrifying, but I wasn’t really sure that Biden could do the job, and I’m not sure that she can do the job.’”
I don't know why Vance is "terrifying" (is it because he's Catholic?) rather than "he's a hick with no idea of how to govern" or "he's a blood-sucking capitalist".
HereAndGone
19d ago
She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign?
After reading "Original Sin", the impression I get is (1) she was really beholden to Biden and his supporters, e.g. a lot of his ex-staff or people connected to him ran her campaign, so she could not afford to piss off any Biden loyalists in the party and (2) she's indecisive: she takes a long time to make decisions, doesn't handle input from others well, and is constantly second-guessing decisions. See the Call Her Daddy appearance where she or her campaign were so terrified by the prospect of not being in complete control of the outcome, they picked this instead of an appearance on Joe Rogan. And she didn't even go on the podcast! Instead they spent campaign funds on "we'll mock up the studio in a hotel room, fly you out, and you feed her pre-screened questions where she gives prepared answers" for something that was essentially preaching to the choir: Harris already had the young white liberal college-educated female podcast audience as voters, she didn't need to chase after them.
So if she decided to strike out on her own, that would leave her wide open for "so why didn't you do any of this when you were VP? why weren't you speaking out and disagreeing with those policies?" and she just hasn't the flexibility to handle that sort of questioning without being prepared fifty ways from Sunday with soundbites from focus groups.
Hence the lack of any actual policies - the need not to be openly in dissent from the Biden administration, the need not to state anything definite that would piss off any of the million little splinter groups that would go for her throat online, and being hobbled by the 2019 run where she did tack too far to the left (and then left herself wide open on "yes I would use government money to pay for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants who are criminals locked up in jail", for instance).
HereAndGone
19d ago
Harris running can be laid at Biden's feet, because he insisted on a second term and then had to be dragged out and knifed in the back by the party in order to dislodge him, by which time there really wasn't anyone else they could run, never mind that the funding by donors had all been earmarked for the Biden/Harris campaign and there was a real fear they'd have to pay it all back if they went with a primary.
The party didn't do itself any favours by then acting the opposite of the 'open, transparent, democratic' process by making her a fait accompli candidate before any race could start, but they were - to be fair to them - really hobbled by their own past bad decisions in humouring Biden (mostly for the "who the hell else do we have? and who else can beat Trump?" considerations).
HereAndGone
19d ago
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug.
But the American president is not a figurehead, he is meant to be the one running the country. If the Prime Minister's girlfriend is in fact the one making the picks as to who gets a job, that is an unfortunate reality, but the girlfriend was not the one elected to do the job. If the Permanent Under-Secretary for Filing Cabinets is the one running the country while the President goes golfing, that is not what the people decided should happen.
And if that is what happens, then the people should be informed, not laughed at for being too dumb to realise that they have been lied to for decades.
HereAndGone
19d ago
That even before the questions about his ability became pubilc, Biden had been doing little to nothing in actually governing the country and the decisions were being made by a mix of insiders, cabinet members, civil servants, and whoever could grab the spotlight to get their pet project rammed through.
I think this may well have been the case; does anyone think, for instance, that Joe Biden personally really really wanted Sam Brinton as deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy? Or that the LGBT Pride Celebration with the topless trans people on the White House lawn was a cherished long-time plan of his? There's an awful lot of "he probably just signed what was put in front of him" that seems to be there, even if we discount the autopen!
HereAndGone
19d ago
never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
There's some hint that this was precisely the policy the Biden administration (or the Politburo, or whomever you want to point the fingers at) adopted to muzzle Kamala: all the stories that leaked out about "trouble in the VP's office" and how she was a terrible manager and had high staff turnover and was being sidelined by Biden's office so she constantly was the last to know about things going on and never got the chance to make a name for herself (apart from things like being saddled with the 'Border Czar' position which was a poisoned chalice).
So whatever ambitions she may have had, the Biden inner circle/Biden himself made sure to quash so she would not be able to build up the reputation as the dynamic young rival for the next race. Ironically, Kamala herself seems to have picked her VP on the same criteria: Walz because he was not visibly ambitious and would not be a threat and would be content to stand in the background and do as he was told.
Plus he's the one single black Elf in the company. Which is okay, I guess, since all the other white Elves get murderised by the Orcs later so at least it didn't happen to anyone important. It's even dumber because the "Southlands" are what later becomes "Mordor", and the Elven garrison is there specifically because the ancestors of the Southlanders fought on the side of Morgoth.
So it's bordered by "to the northeast and east, Rhûn; to the southeast, Khand; and to the south, Harad" which means that the population there has every reason to be racially mixed. But no, we get the majority of the actors with speaking parts being white and racist to The One Single Black Elf, while the good person is the healer Bronwyn played by an Iranian-British actress. I guess the "racism bad, mmkay?" point wouldn't have landed the same had it been brown or black characters abusing a white Elf.
Maybe it's just me, but Cruz Cordova is such a bad actor. I couldn't believe the reviews praising him, he's as wooden as his breastplate in the role.
More options
Context Copy link