naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
What's unhealthy about being gay or lesbian? I guess transgenderism is different because it's kind of defined as dysmorphia even by its activists, but I don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality.
Well, what's "unhealthy" about anything? Is it "unhealthy" to eat bacon? Apparently yes. Why? Because it shortens your lifespan and creates other complications. Does being homosexual shorten your lifespan?
In short, yes. I have deliberately linked the response of the authors of the relevant study to what they call "homophobic groups [who] appear more interested in restricting the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being." Their only goal was to demonstrate the needs of the gay community, not to strengthen any homophobic agenda. Furthermore, advances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc. Which we typically do not ban, but do often seek to regulate, or at least socially disapprove.
"But sexuality is a part of people's core immutable identity!" I'm skeptical of that, for reasons that aren't important to this argument, but I definitely hear the same thing from obese people, who I've known to talk about food the way that some homosexuals talk about the impossibility of just not doing that. I'm not sure I can accept that it is dehumanizing to be told that your preferred behaviors are unhealthy or even socially forbidden, but I am comfortable that it is unpleasant, and the consequences of letting people eat bacon or have consensual unprotected anal sex in public places with total strangers are in many cases low enough that the costs of forbidding that behavior is more than society should bear. But let's set aside the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections in homosexual men, the high comorbidity of psychiatric disorders that does not seem to be abating as societal acceptance improves, and the effects of promiscuity which apply to everyone but more to homosexual men than any other demographic...
Is infertility "unhealthy?"
This is the final motte of the natural law theorist. Organisms are generally healthy when every part is performing its "proper function." Many parts of you have the function of keeping you alive; if your heart stops pumping blood, it's curtains. Some parts are more utilitarian; if your eyes stop translating photons into useful neurological information, you're not going to die (at least not as a direct result), but you might talk to your doctor about approaches to restoring them.
So what's the proper function of your sex organs and attendant "sexual attraction" neurocircuitry?
Obviously, homosexuality is not infertility of the gonads. But homosexuals (at least if they are strict about their homosexuality) must rely on artificial reproductive technologies for sexual reproduction in the way that people with poor vision must wear glasses to see. Given the prevalence of fertility clinics, it would be weird to say that infertility is not a question of being "unhealthy" (indeed, one highly successful approach to fertility treatment for the obese is: lose weight). One does not visit the fertility doctor when everything is working as nature intended arranged via processes of natural selection over millions of years. There is no effective, humane "treatment" for homosexuality, but--imagine if, in 1899 A.D., someone discovered an easily-farmed plant in the rainforest with sap that reset the neurocircuitry of human sexual attraction to "reproductive sex" mode. How would history look different?
Now, before I get dog-piled with "but causation" and "but elective sterilization" and "but anti-natalism" and "but bisexuals" and all the other entirely-too-obvious "buts" (I will not make a cheeky comment about "but" sex here dammit sorry sorry):
I don't think any of this matters very much. We did not discover a magical sexuality-changing tree sap in 1899, we do have a variety of interventions to circumvent the costs of our preferences and desires, including "unhealthy" ones, and perhaps most importantly, I eat bacon. Literally, and also metaphorically, where "bacon" is a stand-in for all the many ways I fail to do what is optimally healthy, because for whatever reason it's not who I am, no matter what my rational mind tells me I should prefer in my own best interests. I echo the letter from the lifespan study: the point here is not to excuse any mistreatment of any individual based on the character of their sexual appetites.
But you said you "don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality," which statement would seem to me to require a very constrained definition of "unhealthy," much more constrained than we apply in basically any other context.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
So would you agree that blackface is not "anti-black" per se? Do you believe that caricatures of Jews are not "anti-Semitic" per se?
There are a thousand reasons to dress in drag as a nun other than being anti-Catholic. To criticize certain Catholic doctrines re homosexuality.
Er... maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "anti-Catholic," but criticizing Catholic doctrines of homosexuality sounds paradigmatically "anti-Catholic" to me. Pushing back on political efforts by the Catholic church seems "anti-Catholic," especially given the Church's long political history.
And, btw, one can criticize the Catholic Church (an enormously powerful institution) without criticizing either Catholics or Catholicism.
Catholics, maybe, but Catholicism? This seems like splitting hairs incredibly fine, to the point of suggesting a motte and bailey doctrine at play. Mockery has long been a highly effective approach to criticism, and criticism is not pro-, it is anti-.
"You can keep your Catholicism, we're just going to level your Church, caricature your symbols, mock your practices--no, we're not anti-Catholic per se, don't be ridiculous!"
That seems implausible to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.
We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.
At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games.
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher.
It is a tangent, but Palestinians and Native Americans have a lot in common, geopolitically. For example, in my experience there tends to be a lot of talk about the "ongoing genocide" against both groups, which are growing and have never been larger. That's a remarkable accomplishment in the face of "ongoing genocide!" To say nothing of their selective endorsement of ethnonationalism and feudal notion of binds between blood and land, but only for non-whites...
I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
This process is well underway. The so-called "civil rights movement" transformed racialism from a legal and social liability to a legal and social advantage. For those who lack a plausible race claim, novel takes on sex and sexuality offer an alternative. And yet in most places I've seen this pointed out, someone inevitably trots out the strawman: "you think someone would just choose to belong to an oppressed minority? Hah!"
Except that's exactly what the numbers seem to be telling us. People follow the incentives, and flee the costs. We've incentivized fracture and factionalism, so fracture and factionalism is what we are getting.
This is super weird. The College Board appears to be flat-out grandstanding; their interpretation of the Florida law, even assuming they are not being disingenuous for purely culture war reasons, is in absolutely no way binding on Florida residents. They're not a court, or a legislature. They are, if anything, arguably engaged in the unauthorized practice of law by giving legal advice to schoolteachers and administrators.
But then, apparently, some number of school districts have chosen to believe the College Board (or pretend to believe the College Board) over and above the advice of the Florida Department of Education. This is mind-boggling, like telling the President of the U.S. to fuck off because Google told you what the law really is. The district statement linked in the article says:
In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law.
But the College Board is a private company that assigns AP credit entirely on the basis of a single exam. Eligibility to take the exam is not limited to students enrolled in "approved" AP classes! According to the registration page, "If you’re homeschooled or you go to a school that doesn’t administer AP Exams, you’ll need to arrange to take exams at a local school that does administer them." So long as some private school in Florida is approved by the College Board to administer the AP Psychology exam, there's nothing stopping students from pursuing that credit even if the College Board makes good on its threat, which it seems unlikely to do. And as I understand it, no AP class can cover all possible material anyway; the AP teachers I know are constantly working to guess what items will appear on the exam in which years, so as to better focus their lesson planning.
Basically, someone on the College Board appears to have decided to grandstand, and a whole bunch of gullible educators are now being used as props in an institutional campaign against Ron DeSantis, who doesn't even appear well-positioned to get the nomination at this point. I would be very interested in thoughts on how the College Board can be punished for this defection from the standard that educational advantages should not be denied to children based solely on the political identity of their state's governor.
EDIT:
I was wrong in thinking that the College Board was one-sidedly attacking the Florida Department of Education.
Here is the relevant language from the letter the Florida people sent to the College Board in May:
Based on recent changes to State Board of Education rule and Florida law, we implore you to immediately conduct a thorough review of all College Board courses ... and inform [us], by June 16, 2023, whether these courses need modification to ensure compliance. Some courses may contain content or topics prohibited by State Board of Education rule and Florida law.
So a government body says to a private company "hey, you're an important participant in our state's education program, but our new state law may have some influence on how that continues in the future. Can we get you to jump through some hoops so we can keep doing business with you?" And the private company responds, "[we] will not modify our courses."
It's really important to notice that wasn't the question! The letter raised the possibility of modification, but did not actually request it; what it requested was an audit ensuring compliance with state law, which is a perfectly normal request when dealing with private parties participating in public education. If I were running the College Board, my immediate response would be "Just conducted a content audit; seems to me that all the material in our course is age-appropriate for 9-12 graders. You might consider adding a permission/informed consent slip for parents to sign just in case, throw in some language about them agreeing that the material is age appropriate. Pleasure doing business!"
So yeah, this does look like it was a pretty one-sided attack from the College Board.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson?
...this is worse than I thought!?
The Wikipedia citation goes to the book
Mayo, Peter (1999). Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-85649-614-8.
On page 5 of that book, the quote is indeed attributed to Jane Thompson, as the editor of another book. The Gramsci book is on archive.org, the footnote points us to a 1980 text by Thompson, Adult Education for Change at page 26 (but also repeated in a different text by M. Mayo). That book is also on archive.org, and when you turn to page 26, you can see Thompson has block-quoted the block-quoted text, which she attributes to Paulo Freire! But return to the 1972 Freire text and you will see that, no, that quote is definitely part of Shaull's introduction to the book.
Just... astonishing. Multiple misattributions, literally none of the people quoting Shaull had any idea what they were doing. Words fail me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.
Yeah, this sort of thinking has always been puzzling to me--nobody studies biology without learning Latin names, nobody studies math without learning Greek letters. "Black people won't go birdwatching because all the birds are named Smith" is an utterly baffling take. That said--
Nol says she recently was visiting some salt marshes this summer and saw a common bird there that's called Wilson's Snipe, which has a long bill and engages in dramatic displays such as flying in high circles, which produces a whistling sound as air flows over specialized feathers. "And I thought, what a terrible name," she says. "I mean, Wilson was the father of modern ornithology in North America, but this bird has so many other evocative characteristics."
If "evocative" is the real goal, I suppose if they decide to start naming birds stuff like "Talonflame" or "Spearow" maybe I could get on board...?
I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.
This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel." The 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian Arabs are not the problem, here. Those Palestinians who turned their noses up at a single state solution put themselves (and their descendants) in the "box" Saul decries. Hamas does not want a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights. Only the Israelis want that. There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.
It's amazing to watch people equivocate in their response to this single, incredibly hard truth. The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true. To say "there is no disputing" that Israelis killing innocents engenders rage, and yet mumble about crystal balls when it is pointed out that Hamas and their backers are fully committed to the extermination of Israel, is insane to me. Exactly one side of this conflict is openly genocidal, and it's not the Israelis. "Oh I agree that Hamas is evil but it's very important that we blame Israel even for that" is such a mind-boggling take, to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.
(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])
Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?
I do not!
Not sure what else to say about it, though. Cultural reproduction is a really complicated proposition even in monocultures; in places with values pluralism, you're basically always going to be goring someone's ox. What Freire (and all the crits) tend to get wrong is that they decline to subject their own proposed solutions to the standards of their own critique. At best their position basically boils down to "yes, your way is not neutral, I guess our way is also not technically neutral but noticing that makes us the good guys so it's okay when we do it." Contemporary identity politics is just yeschad.jpg-ing your own views while wojacking your opponent's.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
@TitaniumButterfly's original comment:
In reality, it’s like being ‘free’ in a post-apocalyptic ‘The Road’ style wasteland versus an all-expenses-paid hotel stay where omnipotent gods protect and serve you for your whole life.
I'm broadly sympathetic to your overall point and would be on your side of such a debate 9/10 times but in this case I do want to push back a bit. I breed and hunt with birds of prey and have had a lot of time to consider this question.
Overall you're more than correct. People will see a falcon sitting on a perch in captivity and say things like "Oh that's so sad, it's tied down and it wants to be free." No, not really. Not at all, actually. Flying is hard work and if (actually when) they get to choose between flying around for a reward and simply sitting and being fed, they will choose the latter every time. And if they're pushed into the former it's not uncommon for them to try to weasel out of it by just sitting somewhere to see if they can outwait you into producing food to get them to return. This is a whole thing, most of them have to be trained out of that instinct, and more than once I've spent a night under a tree, refusing to produce a reward for a falcon until it's gotten back up in the sky and flown around a bit. Reward them for sitting once and they'll never want to fly again.
But there is an exception. Given the choice to sit and be fed, or go out and hunt some real game, they will about destroy themselves in their eagerness for the latter.
I will never forget the sight of my apprentice's hawk on his first live rabbit. He bound to it, we dispatched it, and then he spent roughly the next twenty minutes visibly trembling with emotion. His crest up, his eyes aflame, like every cell of his body was radiating golden light. It was clearly a transformative experience, and I don't think I'm prone to inappropriately romanticizing these creatures.
They live for this stuff. And I think other animals must feel the same way about a lot of things, including securing and defending territory, competing for mates, etc. Yeah, most of them are losers in such processes, but the winners get something I think they'd agree is worth having, and it is the impulse of life to shoot for the stars even if most must fall short.
Animals don't have any kind of abstract notion of freedom or self-determination. But they are wired to appreciate certain things, and I think that the zoo (or household pet) experience is rather like pod life. A lot of men, for example, would be 'happy' with something like state-issued ai robot waifus, plentiful netflix and video games, and enough industrially-produced food to satisfy them, but those who have felt what it is to be chosen by a beautiful mate, to have achieved mastery in their craft, to have lived in real, functional human community, would look at that and be horrified.
No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it.
To quote Doctor Alan Grant, the T-rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And huskies want to range hundreds of miles, and collies want to herd.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
My experience is that it is extremely politically biased--on any page where political bias seems likely. This is probably to be expected; "wokism" (or at least a certain strain of it) is arguably just "the unstable populist ideology that emerged from post-smartphone internet memes in the anglophone world" and so is the default ideology of all websites minus those that are explicitly anti-woke (compare Conquest's Laws). Wikipedia is online and not explicitly anti-woke, ergo it has the standard anglophone internet bias (where applicable).
Fortunately--I think!--most Wikipedia pages are not (yet?) politically relevant, and thus often quite useful and more or less devoid of political bias (though not, it bears mentioning, other kinds of bias, for example against any heterodox views on the relevant subject matter). Many people like to remind others that Wikipedia, while useful, should probably not be taken as a definitive or authoritative source of anything. It is my view that this warning is probably wisely heeded, however, in connection with all sources of knowledge.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Was there ever a large market of comic book nerds?
Back in 2011 I remember hearing someone say something like "if every single person who had ever read a Green Lantern comic book showed up to see the movie, and no one else, the movie would be a catastrophic bomb." This tracks my intuitions regarding film adaptations of novels as well--a million book copies sold is an achievement. A million movie tickets sold is, for anything but the cheapest of indie flicks, a catastrophe.
In the comic world, print runs of 500,000 or more were common in the 1950s and 60s. Today, most print runs are in the 5 figures. Not every comic book nerd buys a copy of every title! But the year-end figures for 2021 (distributors stopped sharing sales numbers in April 2022) suggest that Diamond (the primary distributor of comic books) moved about 84 million books that year. If the average comic purchaser bought 2 books per month (and to be clear, I have no idea how many books the average comic purchaser picks up per month, but my pull list is usually longer than that)--there are only perhaps 3.5 million Americans (North Americans?) in the habit of buying comic books. It would not surprise me at all if the real number is less than a million.
Of course, there are digital comics, too. Web comics. Piracy. But mostly, people just don't read--not even the funny books. The other day I was talking to an engineer and somehow the topic of Batman came up and he said, "oh, I'm a huge Batman fan!" And I said, "hey, me too--do you have a favorite arc?" His response was, "uh, well, I really liked the new movie--the one with Bane, you know." I said, "The Dark Knight Rises? From like ten years ago?" He said, "Yeah, the old movie was pretty good too, with Jack Nicholson, but the new one with Bane was great!"
Most people just don't have the autism required to be a dedicated fan of one thing, never mind a whole universe of main characters. But "I wanna turn my brain off for a couple hours" is something almost everyone experiences, on a fairly regular basis. So having a huge backlist of source material is valuable quite regardless of whether you're going to make something "good" out of it. Adapting novels is tricky because authors get precious about stuff and it's hard to buy a whole universe of main characters in one fell swoop. The stories and characters in the funny books were already corporate-packaged to begin with, so there's a super-convenient well of material to draw from.
It seems to me that the same forces that drove down comic book print runs are what drive down movie sales (when movie sales drop at all). It's not about producing good or bad stuff. It's just that there is way more competition for your time and attention today than there was even ten years ago, never mind 50 years ago. More channels, more websites, more video games, more social media. Once AI gets good enough to do some of the heavy lifting, I expect such trends to be extended even further.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender.
I mean, you're not obligated to agree with me, but I did provide a fair bit of evidence you don't appear to have actually gone over.
There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.
Female role models, yes. Feminine role models, no, at least not qua feminine role models.
I included the links I did quite deliberately; the Louise Antony interview concludes with her commentary that she supports the transsexual movement to the extent that it undermines the gender binary. To add to that, Sally Haslanger has written that "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." Any time you see the phrase "eliminate gender inequality" you are looking at words that mean "eliminate gender differences" which is functionally equivalent to "eliminate gender"--because if all genders are identical, then there is only one gender, and since gender exists to distinguish different things, collapsing gender into socially identical constructs collapses gender entirely.
I also found this blog which agrees that
Gender, or some forms thereof, is seen by the vast majority of feminists as undesirable in many ways
The article goes on to note that some feminists think that gender can't be abolished in every possible way, but even this is marked as "unfortunate":
One can wish to abolish gender roles and gender stereotypes, but preserve gender identity and gender norms as unfortunately inevitable in some way.
Feminism, as I said, has been broadly gender eliminativist for more than a century, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. It's not a selling point! It's not something you're likely to hear from a Democrat politician any time soon--any more than you will hear them say "abolish the family." But it is one of the core values of the whole movement, something that informs every other action, even actions by people (most people!) who have no idea that the point and purpose of their activism was written long ago. As Keynes observed:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."
Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
I don't understand the point about Irulan.
Irulan is described thusly:
Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos
Let's not do this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
You seem to just be imagining teachers to be some type of demonic criminal bent on destroying children's lives
I don't know how you could possibly take that from what I wrote. All I said was that there's no reason to think that teachers, as a class, are in a better position to decide what is good for children than are their parents.
Teachers are not assigning children new pronouns against their will.
I never suggested as much. Teachers and administrators are deciding to hide information about children from parents, selectively and based on politically popular but empirically dubious notions of sex and gender. When my children were young, I was in communication with teachers about basically every aspect of my child's schooling--if they got a nosebleed, if they were struggling in math, who their friends were, basically anything that dealt either with my child's welfare, the quality of their education, or even just things it seemed like I might want to know.
What is the difference between 'concealing information about' and 'not informing on'? Because it's not like we're talking about a law preventing teachers from giving parents information
In the Saskatchewan case from the OP, yes, but trans activists make policies, too.
If a parent cares about their child's life then it is their job to find out about it, and if they've scared their child into thinking it is literally not physically safe to tell them something then that is the parent's fuck-up and they're not entitled to state-sponsored spy operations.
It is absurd to suggest that open communication between parents and teachers constitutes "spying" just so long as a child wishes to keep something from his or her parents. Many people entertain irrational fears. But even if those fears are rational, I can't imagine a child confiding their sexuality or gender confusion in a teacher, and then not confiding abuse to that teacher, at which point mandatory reporting laws kick in (there are many things teachers must tell the government; why wouldn't there be many things teachers must tell parents?). It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result, even if only in the sense that they expose themselves to manipulation and exploitation. Google "sextortion suicide" if you want to read more about the effects of teens "confiding" in people who aren't their parents.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You've probably repeated a few yourself.
I haven't created the impression in you that I'm actually extremely neurotic about quotation authenticity?
...uh, well, good!
naraburns
nihil supernum
15d ago
The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?
I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.
Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle.
I mean--I did characterize it as a "small thing!" But when a (widely known as incompetent) video game company feels comfortable removing distinct genders from what is sometimes characterized as a "kids game," that doesn't seem like a completely empty data point, either.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Hah! This is an beautifully parsimonious take which absolutely should have occurred to me, and did not. Of course, the reason for the blindfold is commonly held to be that all are equal before the law, not judged by station or appearance. But it is my understanding that the blindfold was first added, in 1494, as satire, to suggest that Justia was blind to the injustices being committed by lawyers:
The first known image to show a blindfolded justice comes from a woodcut, possibly by Albrecht Dürer, published in Ship of Fools, a collection of satirical poems by fifteenth century lawyer Sebastian Brant. This 1494 image is not a celebration of blind justice, but a critique. A fool is applying the blindfold so that lawyers can play fast and loose with the truth.
It's a fun bit of trivia to share with students from time to time, but it honestly did not even occur to me that it might apply to my critique, here. I guess because I'm not entirely persuaded that these cases are really miscarriages of justice? I don't have any real problem with the outcomes of either case, despite my poking fun at Kennedy's writing style. More like--I'm just not persuaded that either case is as grounded in reality as we might naturally prefer our landmark cases to be?
Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
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