Tanista
1d ago
I remember when she actually used to be the token good one, until she gave it away and became even better.
Then she had to open her mouth.
Tanista
1d ago
I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset
This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.
I take it more as scapegoating than anything.
Tanista
1d ago
I know JK Rowling has taken steps to force Warner's to source ethical products for their Harry Potter theme parks so she at least made an effort, and I'm inclined to think an artist selling books is likely pretty low on the totem pole of evil moneymakers in the first place.
The first historical pagan reference to Christianity is from ~112 CE by Pliny the Younger, governor of northern Turkey, asking the Emperor his advice on dealing with recalcitrant Christians.
Notice in this story that he didn't already know what to do and, iirc, was basically told by Trajan to not go looking for problems just handle them when they came up.
But you're right. I was thinking that the systematic persecutions came much later under Diocletian which long postdates the Gospel's likely dates (and that at the time of their writing the Romans were just hostile towards Jews in general and had no reason to pick apart their endless ideological debates*), which is true. But forgot about Nero's opportunistic behavior. That shows they were at least known and/or distrusted by pagans as well.
* Which explains some of their conciliatory gestures.
Tanista
1d ago
In the time of Christ and the early Church, the key neighbors in question were the Romans who tried and failed across the next >350 years to torture, rape and murder Christianity out of existence. It wasn't be nice to your immediate neighbors, everybody does that, it was show love to the men leading you to the pyre. If purely for reasons of history and epistemic hygiene, should your primary understanding of Christianity have come from American Scripturalists and the modern atheism they spawned, you are lacking 1800 years of empirical record.
There are verses that call for cooperation with and forgiveness of state authorities, though they may be oppressive.
But, in the time of Jesus or at least the writing of the Gospels, it's just as if not more likely that it meant Jews, actual neighbors who persecuted Christians who tried to stay in the same communities. Paul admits he tried to destroy the Church and he likely wasn't the only one. It's dubious if the Romans recognized it as anything other than a cult led by a rabble rouser.
Tanista
1d ago
God is a Yankee?
But yes, @Thoroughlygranted has the right of it: The writers were part of the WGA regardless of their nationality and so there was no one around to write the script.
Big movies tend to be unionized. I remember it was a big issue with From Dusk Till Dawn - covered in Full Tilt Boogie if you really care - where they faced strikes and shut downs for making a movie for $15 million (which I guess passed whatever indie cutoff they were willing to tolerate)
Craig/the production could have tried to find some anonymous scab but do you want them writing for Bond? And even people who aren't in that guild are in another one, so it'd be pretty awkward for them.
Tanista
1d ago
I think Quantum of Solace can be blamed on the writer's strike. Skyfall wasn't bad. The Christoph Waltz movies were ruined by spending too much time caught up in the canon of Bond, much like Tom Cruise climbed up his own ass in the last couple of Mission films trying to weld it into a coherent arc that no one asked for.
Which I think is just a general industry trend now.
If you don't bite the bullet and become sex-negative (many do) you can make the same argument left-wingers make for decriminalizing drugs: sex work being work doesn't make it unpleasant (plenty of work is), it just means it should be brought out of the shadows to better protect those very vulnerable women and given the protections of any hazardous job since those women are gonna do it anyway (apply the left wing skepticism, arguably selective, of prohibition here)
Millionaire actresses don't have to strip every four minutes on Euphoria unless perv "visionary" directors like Sam Levinson want to make a point.
Tanista
3d ago
It disappeared faster than Kony 2012 once people started criticizing.
It was more that I was skeptical that the mindset is actually new. I think people just have way more channels to spread this stuff outside of respectable media.
And whether it'll stick this time. The left didn't win on Horton at the time, but they attempted to frame all such measures (including Clinton's crime bill) as modern racism and they succeeded well enough to get themselves a repeat experiment in coddling criminals for a couple of years.
"He's from a moderately competent community" seems less relevant than "He seems like a wannabe violent asshole".
It's interesting how much of the discourse is centered around Sikhs-as-good-'uns.
Some implications for how people see other cases in their heart of hearts.
Tanista
5d ago
Take the murder of Iryna Zarutska. She was stabbed by a career criminal who had been let out of jail before. If this is just a tragedy, there is not much to do except arrest the perpetrator and try to put him in jail. But if this is an injustice, it's an indictment of the entire judicial system that the criminal was not already in jail. The murder isn't just something that happens but is something that was "allowed" to happen.
This is just a reversion to the - at the time successful - Willie Horton strategy.
Tanista
7d ago
Agreed, but then we end up having to watch said canon crash and burn when someone without any love for the IP grabs hold of it and inserts their own vision, and then mocks the people who are suddenly alienated because har har I peed all over your stuff now I own it. A fandom should, in such cases, be able to organize and just pay some other person to continue from where things left off and go on their merry way. This could happen in the current era, but in practice, coordination problems mean you can't outbid Corporations for the rights.
Hey, at least fans can fight over whether Sony's version of the canon is better than Microsoft's. We lost something when the console wars died down.
Tanista
7d ago
If they have $100 million, they can create their own brand with slightly different details, so it steals ideas from the existing brand without violating its copyright, and succeed off marketing even if their brand is worse.
Then why did they pay Lucas $4 billion?
I don't deny that this has happened but the examples - e.g. 50 Shades of Grey which was transformed even if the core point of "dark triad alpha loves me" was kept, that Anne Hathaway movie - say something and the fact that studios still pay or overpay for IP does too.
In both cases, the original creator probably ends up with more sales and attention than they would've otherwise, by being credited with inspiring the heavily-marketed release.
I think Lucas prefers the billions he made before Disney could just copy him + the billions he made selling it to them to the honor of being the John Carter to whatever successful series Disney made off his ideas.
Certainly, one could argue that Lucas introduced people to Flash Gordon and Japanese cinema but how many? I was a pretty big SW fan and I don't think I ever watched anything because I was told it inspired SW.
Tanista
7d ago
A central example of a xenophobe would be someone who dislikes another culture he knows very little about. "I don't understand their language, their food smells strange, their customs are weird, they are probably up to no good and I want them gone."
I don't know that I'd consider an Israeli or Turkish imperialist who hated and feared his neighbors but wasn't ignorant about them a fringe example of a xenophobe.
You can't stop anyone from writing a story, especially nowadays. In practice, copyright has a chilling effect.
If there's no money in it you've driven away a lot of people (cynically: the most talented people who would offend writers the most). In a pre-internet world your reach is also going to be functionally miniscule so, except for the love of the game, why do it?
This is true even in fanfiction where Anne McCaffrey's antipathy towards fanfiction blocked it from FFN for years (despite the pro forma disclaimers writers would make). Back in the day you could scare fans trying to write novels in your world off the major sites purely through copyright law (I think Ao3 feels it's on sturdier ground now and has Dragonriders of Pern fics)
Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.
This is already a known phenomenon with existing IP constraints.
Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war?
His polling was suffering before because of other errors and his general off-putting and erratic nature.
This is just the bit that Trump loyalists can't really digest or rationalize.
DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure
DOGE is either, as @aeqno says, an attempt to punish clients of the ancien regime in which case I suppose it could be said to have put them in some pain (until a post-Trump White House restores their position) or it's an attempt to cut the deficit meaningfully.
If it's an attempt to cut the deficit (by $2 trillion according to Elon) it was always retarded populist slop because we know where the budget goes. The Boomercon businessman plan seems to imagine some ruthless guy who will cut other people's social spending while leaving the Boomer and their social spending alone. There's a reason the Paul Ryan fiscal wing is dead: boomer Republicans killed them.
If it didn't work for Ryan, why would it work now? Elon can't cut anything that'd make Trump unpopular and Trump has a) given up on fiscal conservatism and b) not really going to push through laws to fix his position anyway.
This is just the mirror image of the progressive-technocrat plan: people who know their policies are unpopular and so are trying to do an end-run around politics.
My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project?
As both a formal and practical matter the "internet-right" doesn't have a political project (it's been overrated since the initial claim that Trump won because of memes). Trump has a political project and the internet-right's job is to try to cajole that elephant in the direction they want.
But a stubborn elephant is hard to move. Most people didn't foresee that Trump had such a durable fascination with things like tariffs.
Leicester winning the EPL.
Leicester winning the PL is the sort of saccharine nonsense you expect to see in Ted Lasso or some other American product.
Tanista
12d ago
Why is horror the exception to the theater recession? SW is underperforming right now but another horror movie is overperforming. It's been this way for a while, a lot of the surprise hits are A24/indie-style horror films.
Tanista
13d ago
For many maybe. I think Aella has earned the presumption of sincerity.
I think she means "open relationship"
Tanista
13d ago
If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it.
In certain subcultures, being in this level means you feel you don't need an open relationship; you can just a) cheat or b) enforce a one-sided/Islamic polyamory model. It certainly doesn't mean "complicate my life by having someone sleep with my wife".
Much more common in the entertainment and athletic fields than the ones Aella frequents so she has that going for her I guess.
Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it.
You don't need to be sent anywhere. For most countries that aren't America or nestled under it or someone else's nuclear umbrella the consequences of bad foreign policy can find you at home.
Bad German foreign policy, for example, let to the widespread rape of German women when the Soviets came to collect.
Tanista
20d ago
I would say gay marriage in the USA. That is when crybulling really really picked up and people started seeing the USA as just a set of ill gotten spoils that needed to be redistributed.
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes (arguably deliberately selected to be that way) and it's much younger than the drive for racial or class based redistribution.
I imagine this sort of life would become markedly less cute in your old age compared to being a wageslave and taking the contribution match for a couple of decades.
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