Tanista
2hr ago
There was also his stepping down to Prime Minister because of the constitutional limits on consecutive terms.
Tanista
2hr ago
There's accusations that it was driven by more mundane motives, specifically to distract or avoid a sexual harassment charge
Putting that aside, I wouldn't underestimate the ability of Europeans to actually get high on their own supply.
He publicly came out in support of the action (while also maintaining the ICC's jurisdiction didn't apply to the US because ??)
As this situation is showing, the US president has some ability to make things difficult for the ICC. He could have held the line on the taboo and made it clear he didn't approve of the warrant. Instead he backed it.
China and North Korea bad
Honestly, one of my niggling doubts when I didn't take a stance on HBD was how the hell North Korea - despite appearing like an Africa-level basket case - was able to get nukes and survive being an incredible pain in the ass. It fit uncomfortably well with general East Asian competence, just for evil. Then again, of all cases listed, that's probably the one you can blame on geography the most.
If they didn't have Seoul in their sights and China at their backs they would likely have gotten stomped by the US regardless. But it always raised uncomfortable questions.
When the same set of easily rebuttable set of ideas that all resemble each other are always easily wack-a-moled one by one, its not a good sign for the overarching theory or set of theories that is outputting those theories. And that is a fundamental problem for environmental and historical theories at this point.
These books are also often mum on the next most likely success story, whereas Genes>Institutions/Lynnian takes have a clear answer we can at least consider (Lynn was bullish on former socialist states with high IQ like China and Poland but by 2000 that might not have really been inhuman foresight)
The one that really makes me baffled when I skim UK discussions is the idea that Britons wouldn't have human rights without the ECHR or some European organization. I would say there's a lot of self-serving myth-making to justify the European project but Brexit happened and people still seem to believe this stuff.
This is an obvious case of the ICC flying too close to the sun. Whether they like it or not, Israel is considered by the US to be a close ally.
As I said in another discussion recently on reddit: part of this is America's fault. They could have held to a line that non-signatory nations like Russia could never be punished by the ICC which would obviously also cover them and Israel.
Instead they decided to use it against Putin which probably emboldened this mission creep.
Tanista
20hr ago
What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.
They're not just any tribe that refused to convert. They're the tribe(s). They had the books first. Both Christians and Muslims appeal to the antiquity of Jewish religion to justify theirs (Muslims claim that Allah sends a prophet to all people and yet most all of the "canon" examples cited in the Qur'an are Jewish or draw from Jewish myth)
If you truly are God's chosen prophet/Messiah and you were spoken of in past Scriptures, why do the people who've held those scriptures for centuries reject you? The gentiles will ask.
It's simply a theological and political problem that requires an answer and the easiest answer is to discredit and attack the Jews themselves. As they themselves did to their less monotheistic/faithful brethren.
Tanista
21hr ago
Besides religion? Besides nationalism?
A lot of the things people say about the Jews are said about other groups. Ilhan Omar gets the same charge of dual loyalty, with the same basis.
Complaints about white overrepresentation and privilege? Certain applicable to Jews. In hindsight it was sort of hubristic to expect that the young, especially Third Worlders who have ethnic and religious reasons to resent Jews, were going to just buy into the doublethink that "muh culture of education" would allow an exemption from the usual critiques of wypipo.
The difference is that Jews are disproportionately successful and the antisemitism taboo is great at shutting these complaints down, which apparently makes it worse.
Tanista
21hr ago
A shame. A Fuentes-Destiny marriage would be the win for bipartisanship America needs
One option might have been, as you say, to try and mine what worked best in the EU and turn that into films. I'm not sure how well that would have worked. It has generally worked for superheroes, but superheroes are already a mess of different continuities, and films have been considered their own separate continuities from core Marvel or DC canon since the 70s.
I don't see why it matters? The EU was considered a separate continuity by most everyone except us nerds. They could have just wiped it and taken the bits they like and have now adapted anyway like Thrawn.
But there's plenty of stuff you could have used for background worldbuilding or character inspiration (like the post-Emperor warlord era and how the Republic grew) as opposed to doing no worldbuilding at all.
The latter is what I think Ross Douthat recommends here - "treat Darth Vader like Batman".
You can shove in Vader into many works because he's a guy in a suit. The problem with the ST that basically mandates a single canon is that Luke, Leia and Han (who elevate Vader in their interactions) just are certain actors. They didn't start as comic book characters, they are fixed in our minds as certain people in a certain, bounded story that has always been the only certain canon. Everything else changes around that canon but it's what people think of as Star Wars, not sixty different DC continuities and reboots. This is why the ST is a one-shot deal.
You can do what Douthat suggests on the TV side but - and I fully grant it might be the nerd in me - I don't see the point in having thousands of years of open canvas and not simply trying different stuff in different time periods or regions. This is, historically, how the EU handled the need for variety.
Yup. Failing to understand the basic point that discretion in charges leads to misleading criminal records is how Biden (or "Biden") ended up pardoning a witness killer. Though in that case the lower charge was not about leniency but the opposite.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal
ESB built on ANH. It maintained the same foes and made Vader even more interesting. TLJ jettisons the main bad guy and leaves us with a guy who lost to an untrained rando and a comic relief General Hux. It wasn't ESB at all. Superficially, I grant.
Maybe if Rian had actually turned Rey evil as some are suggesting. But it didn't. Which is why I say it's a "fuck you" movie. It doesn't even give you a watered down ESB. If you're too constrained to be truly subversive, don't LARP.
The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
There was an important difference: core stuff had a heavier lift to change. Even when Lucas couldn't even pretend to give a fuck you were not allowed to kill off an Original Trilogy major without permission. This is why Chewbacca's death in Vector Prime required approval and was supposed to be a big deal. Yes, fuck around with who Jaina Solo is going to end up with, fight it out with the comics. But the idea that you can character assassinate and then actually assassinate Han and Luke and do nothing with Leia...there'd be some complaints.
Also, the medium is different. It's easier to experiment with very cheap books compared to your one shot at one of the most anticipated sequels in blockbuster history. (One could suggest that they should have considered the EU as a giant laboratory and learned from the mistakes and distilled the successes like the early MCU instead of throwing it out and remaking the same mistakes all over again)
The problem is the whole premise of the Sequel Trilogy, and it seems to me that blaming everything on TLJ is scapegoating Johnson too much for Abrams' failures.
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more. You already lost anyone who wanted to see something truly different in the reintroduction. After that, you lost anyone who was even theoretically interested in Snoke or the rest of that shit or was holding on to it as a consolation.
This sort of thing is not unknown. The EU writers used to have shitfights and problems too. For Legacy of the Force Karen Traviss was essentially writing her own fanfictions with very strong opinions (Jedi are evil, virile Mandos are gods, basically). She went too far, other writers then took time to deconstruct her bullshit (specifically Troy Denning just having the Mandos absolutely wiped out lol). But, at the very least, the general story continuity was maintained. They only got to editorialize within that. Major decisions were cleared above.
I don't know what went wrong here: Lucas specifically picked Kennedy because she had a lot of experience producing and he figured she'd defend the integrity of Star Wars. She's defended it as her fiefdom but she seems to have no real sense or preference for where the trilogy should go (beyond the usual "diversification") if she just allowed each of these directors to do whatever they wanted. I think it may be that she worked well with Lucas and Spielberg because they had strong creative visions and simply couldn't provide her own and deferred to the creatives out of habit.
Would he have done better if not for Johnson? I just cannot see any reason to think that. He screwed up and effectively killed a big budget science fiction film franchise in exactly the same way before people gave him Star Wars.
Abrams was never supposed to return. It was supposed to be three different directors. Someone else could have taken the plots that existed from TFA and not gone "psych!". Like, Johnson didn't just not give fulfilling answers to Abrams' mystery boxes, he called you stupid for caring and then fucked off leaving you nothing else to care about. Seriously, what did he build? Rose Tico?
Let's grant Abrams is a hack. As matter of numbers imo TFA simply didn't kill the franchise (well...I think he killed Star Wars' best shot at becoming an MCU-like phenomenon in China) or TLJ would have opened much worse. TLJ however did have bad legs and TROS didn't open well either (though obviously Abrams owns the legs here)
This isn't only my judgment: the higher-ups clearly think TLJ was a failure which is why they pulled the alarm and brought Abrams back.
That seems particularly evident to me if we look at the directors' other work? I didn't think much of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I found them more-or-less watchable and entertaining, in a dumb sort of way.
I remember watching Brick as a kid and being blown away. He's actively regressed and that might explain why he did so badly with Star Wars. Sad.
Tanista
3d ago
This is still true today in poorer countries. The word for a married woman and a married woman with status are different in our language. What status? Almost always that they have servants.
Tanista
3d ago
Obviously the West saw what was happening during the Ukraine War and the result was to a) pass over it in silence or b) complain that transwomen were not allowed to defect from their sex and leave
Tanista
3d ago
Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.
You can also mention the massive purge of the military before the war and the subsequent mess they were in when it started.
Aren't even low IQ women better at reading faces and emotions than high IQ men?
I guess that feels nebulous compared to Science^(tm) and hand-eye coordination but it matters a fuckton in the real world.
There are also obviously other things (e.g. leveraging sexuality) but this doesn't play well with old or new moral codes and it has a shelf life
I think we're so many decades down from moral education that people believe at least some of it. Which seems to practically mean being forced to profess belief in all of it because you cannot deny bits and pieces of the blank slateism without being at risk of destruction.
People don't want female firefighters or Marines, but the inability to be honest without threatening the apple cart makes it impossible to check people who exploit the legal system to push us just one step further (unless something truly absurd happens like a Lia Thomas situation that cannot be ignored - but even in that case people are likely benefitting from Title IX being explicitly about sex so these attempted redefinitions can run into a hostile court).
Groups are actively leveraging this. It's very common with the trans stuff. There's constant claims that black women will suffer from going back to sexed bathrooms (yes, the new left wing take is that black women are so manly banning men will keep them out). Similarly, a common line of attack is that you're an essentialist and being essentialist is bad because what next? Race essentialism? If sex is real, why wouldn't someone argue race is real?
If they never believed in any of this none of this would have force. That poor professor who got fired for being frustrated at how badly her black students were doing wouldn't have been frustrated or have any cognitive dissonance at all.. You think Amy Wax is losing sleep over it?
That's why it's so difficult to dislodge this gender ideology stuff. Everyone is trapped in the same lie. No one can stand outside of it in the simplest, most expedient manner ("men are men and women are women and, frankly, the government shouldn't be involved") robs them of their own tools and stories.
Tanista
4d ago
The "deconstructing Skywalker supremacy " stuff is also only in hindsight. JJ had no idea who Rey's parents were in TFA (Rian could have done anything he wanted there - simply have her be a particularly force sensitive child) and the EU is also full of non-Skywalkers having their moment. Which makes sense, because the core movies are about one set of characters.
We've discussed how other parts of it, namely Holdo's costuming, are both derivative and miss the point of what they're drawing from.
Tanista
4d ago
I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels.
It's a relay race. It doesn't matter if, in isolation, TLJ was the least bad. It was so bad that it hobbled TROS (it's pretty damning that the studio that hired you basically wiped your contribution so it isn't really even a fan thing) so there's really no point talking about it being better than it.
TROS was fucked anyway for a variety of reasons (Fisher dying,the hiring and firing of Trevorrow) but TLJ gave it no good lead in.
Abrams made a hack's movie but you're just never convince me that it isn't malpractice to throw out everything that even looked like set up in the second part of a trilogy when you had no say in how the third part would go.
This is a mistake that happened all over the EU. And in Doctor Who, where people grew up so enamored with their vision of what DW is that they squeezed it in instead of accepting that the canon and fandom was where it was. Sorry, you're in a relay race, you don't get to have it your way.
Johnson has to eat most of the blame. Or rather, Kennedy has to get it for allowing Johnson to do this.
Tanista
4d ago
If they're doing end-runs I don't see why you'd be surprised that the whole "equal protection" bit has clear caveats on who gets discriminated against. The logic is there to hunt down racists who got slightly smarter after the end of segregation after all.
In other countries (Canada) they just make this clear but people have to be smarter in America.
The Democrats don't percieve their lawfare as unprovoked, at least not the rank-and-file and the voters.
Letitia James actually is the one example where you can actually get prominent Democrats to admit that it may have been a bit much. I think because of the business element (not every Democrat is some rich-hating socialist, many actually have skin in the game) and the fact no one wants this to be the precedent set (that and going around talking about "getting" Trump)
I think this is partly hindsight. Anything from NY either didn't harm Trump or actively backfired and they can always tell themselves that the other cases were just, just slow or badly handled.
Fani Willis is corrupt and incompetent but, in comparison,I don't think most of the base thinks that Trump is innocent of trying to influence the election.
Oop, cut an earlier bit. Biden supported the Europeans trying Putin for war crimes, while admitting the US didn't recognize the court either.
So basically a warrant from an organization that neither the US nor Russia recognize and will never actually lead to Putin's arrest because it's a "strong point".
While no one might be suicidal enough to try to try US servicemen there are other more vulnerable US allies that could be the victims of said court, so a strong US line (as opposed to "it's okay if it makes a strong rhetorical point") may have given people second thoughts.
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