StJohnOfPatmos
2d ago
Jacques Hébert
Jacques Hébert was not guillotined for being a public intellectual lmao, he was a political heavyweight who literally openly called for violent insurrection and paid the price.
Camille Desmoulins
Once again, not killed for being a public intellectual, but for being a member of Parliament who sided with Danton against Robespierre. Do you legit not understand the difference?
Jean-Paul Marat.
Marat was assassinated by a vengeful aristocrat acting on private terms - how does this have anything to do with the state's relationship to him? Huh? You're 0/3 so far on understanding the basic premise of my argument.
In fact if you name anybody of import in French literature he was prosecuted, exiled or threatened:
Simply not true - Voltaire was roughed up once by some aristocrat's goons, but he enjoyed vast state protection despite being a constant troublemaker. Molière obviously comes to mind, too. Zola only got sentenced for libel after publishing J'Accuse, a situation he voluntarily engineered to raise awareness about Dreyfuss. Descartes was never persecuted, neither was Balzac. Flaubert was found not guilty for moral offences and cleared of all charges - you're just listing random names, lying about them, and hoping I don't know any better, right?
be it leftists like Victor Hugo
You mean the guy elected to the Senate who had a boulevard named after him during his lifetime and received a massive state funeral, with his remains instantly delivered into the Panthéon? His previous brief exile - after which he received an official Imperial pardon and full amnesty - seems more significant to you than that?
Any idea of how it was some supposed softspoken liberal paradise, where everybody sang kumbaya,
Ugh, this is beneath the level of basic maturity for me. Not interested in responding further - write a normal comment if you want to have a sensible discussion. Less blatant lying too, please.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Isn't there a pretty obvious ceiling on that? For all his wealth, Elon Musk cannot consume the same amount as 10 million run-of-the-mill middle class Americans combined, nor does he probably want to.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
not so easy to tell if someone is Algerian vs. French given that they're almost always masked up
I lived in North Paris for 5 years. I can easily tell by the style of dress, voice cadence, vocal tics, and spastic body language when someone is a French-Arab. You're right that some "petits blancs" exist who ape them and their mannerisms, but given the vast video evidence - since they were routinely filming themselves doing the lootings and gloating about it - I would bet good money that the rate of ethnic French who partook in the looting is 5-10% at the absolute maximum, more realistically quite a bit less. I assume you're French, so we both know that even when French ethnics use arab slang like "j'ai le seum", they don't really sound like arabs/racaille, who mostly have a form of diction reminiscent of spitting or retching while talking.
Like the burning down of the Limoges city hall
Once again, not an instance of looting. The guy behind the Limoges arson attack was some banal ageing anarcho-leftist (a type that for some reason seems to grow on trees in South-West France, why is that?) who saw an opportunity to destroy a symbol of oppression or something equally asinine.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Le Pen wins, pulls a Meloni, governs to the center, nothing happens.
Yeah, I think this is pretty much guaranteed. French people are really endearing when they get all wide-eyed and spooked about the prospect of someone called Le Pen ruling in the Élysée Palace - meanwhile, the FN is basically a social-democratic party for lumpens and petit-bourgeois paupers with next to no substantial platform on taking meaningful institutional power and reversing French demographic trends. They're among the mildest "far right" party of note in Europe today, Le Pen can't even be bothered to say that Islam is incompatible with French values
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
I think UBI is increasingly likely should AI disrupt the job market as severely as many predict it will - after all, there can't be an exponential growth in the economy without a sustained level of consumption.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Annihilation also covers political upsets within a Presidential election, but yes, Submission is more prescient now than ever, although people forget that it's not really an Islamophobic book at all. It's probably the most sober and sincere positive assessment of Islam published by a Westerner in recent years, since it pretty convingly argues that Islam is more meaningful and reasonable than the post-Christian nihilism of Secular Europe.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
They're all good, but I'm personally partial to The Map and The Territory because of it's very sensitive focus on artistic production and the struggles of making meaningful art in the 21st century.
To be honest, Houellebecq novels are such page-turners that you can just begin with his first novel Whatever (it's very short, you can basically read it in 1-2 sittings) and work your way through his oeuvre chronologically. All of his novels have a similar voice and rhyme in their content, but most of them have a focused sub-topic he lends specific attention to, such as:
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Hippie culture and the Sexual Revolution (The Elementary Particles/Atomized)
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Islam and Western secularism (Submission)
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Sex tourism (Platform)
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Cloning and the distant Future (The Possibility of an Island)
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Antidepressants (Serotonin)
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Art (The Map and The Territorry)
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Terrorism and National Security (Annihilation)
If you don't want to read him chronologically, just pick whatever topic seems most compelling to you and start there.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
I've seen a lot of footage of the riots, and there's evidently plenty of ethnically French participation. The riots started in the some very immigrant-heavy parts of Paris but their spread to the whole of the country necessitates participation by plenty of Gauls, too.
This is absolute nonsense and a really horrid lie that needs to be dispelled firmly - I clearly referred to the mass looting, not the riots, as being nigh-exclusively committed by immigrants or immigrant offspring. Conflating the riots (burned cars, attacks on city halls and government buildings, etc.) happening in the context of the mass protests, which were indeed driven by mainly ethnic French people, with the organized looting of shopping streets in over 140 towns is a false equivalency, since they were separate incidents driven by separate actors. Please provide a single video source of looted stores in which even a small plurality of the looters can be identified as ethnic French. Every single video I saw, without exception, showed a crushing supermajority of looters being the usual suspects; just turning on the sound and hearing them speak (wesh wesh tema le footlocker, jure sur le coran wallah) is usually sufficient.
And no, the looting did not start in immigrant-heavy parts of town whatsoever - they descended from the banlieues into the city centres and targeted shopping streets mainly run by ethnic French. In some cases, the looting was so vast that it spilled into areas in which immigrants live (10ème arrondissement of Paris, for one), but they did not commence there and notably, those were not arab immigrant neighbourhoods, but mainly Indian and Chinese quartiers. The actual areas they live in were almost entirely untouched.
The rest of your comment I do agree with - both the RN and LFI have absurd spending policies that are laughable considering the fiscal crisis France is in. Eric Zemmour points this out often, but Marine Le Pen is essentially a left-wing woman running a family business, which just happens to be a far-right party.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
The really pernicious part of France's hate speech laws is that in theory and on paper, they are very robust in their universal application - there have been French-Arab rappers condemned for anti-white lyrics in their songs, for example. But whether or not a clearly hateful comment even makes it to trial seems to be at the mysterious discretion of unnamed judges and fonctionnaires (France's elite state bureaucrats), who pick and choose their cases with an evident bias. It has already widely been reported on that Marine Le Pens trial for embezzling EU funds was purposefully organised in a manner to maximally hurt her campaigning, as the embezzlement story was publicly known since 2014, but the French justice system inexplicably sat on the case for almost 10 years until she was a credible favourite to win the next election before bringing her to court.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Michel Houellebecq, widely considered the most important living French writer, is once again facing trial for hate speech-related offences, this time for statements he made in an interview in 2022.
In the interview, he hypothesised that once muslims become the hegemonic demographic of France, there will be "reverse Bataclans" - essentially native French engaging in acts of terror against their muslim overlords. The main inciting factor for the trial, which is happening at the behest of the Union of French Mosques (UMF) and the Movement Against Racism And For The Friendship Of Peoples (MRAP), was his statement that the Great Replacement is self-evidently not a "theory", but an easily measurable and observable statistical reality. He faces up to one year in prison and a fine of 45.000 euros.
This trial arrives right as key figures of the main French left-wing party, La France Insoumise, have called for the very mention of any kind of Great Replacement to be criminalised as hate speech (which it already more or less is, depending on how you phrase your stance towards it) - all while simultaneously promoting the concept of the Nouvelle France ("New France"), a deliberately ambiguous term that nonetheless carries a socioethnic component, seeking to uproot the traditional reading of France's national identity (Gauls -> Latins -> Christian Kingdom -> Republic) and replace it with one that gives equal historical and identitarian weight to the populations of the former colonies now living in France. The Leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, currently running for President and occupying the second place in the polls after Marine Le Pen (thus making him the most likely candidate to ender the run-off round of voting in May 2027), has long advanced the idea that traditional French culture is loathsome and scientifically inferior to the Arab World, going as far as saying that the Gothic style of Architecture originating in Saint Denis was due to muslim craftsmen. He has also stated that the language of France should no longer be called French, but should be renamed to "Créole", since the majority of French speakers in the world now reside in Africa. The tragicomedy is that, as a long-standing figure in the French Left originating from the Trotskyist milieu, Mélenchon used to be an outspoken advocate against any forms of religious or ethnic sectarianism - positions he has since walked back and apologised for as his party increasingly became a reservoir of naturalised foreign citizens and muslim interest groups.
As the Centre and Centre-Right of French politics remains weak and highly divided (there are 2 candidates running as the "centrist block", and 5 candidates running as moderate right-wingers, none of which have been able to make a meaningful dent in the polls), the upcoming election will almost certainly be the most politically polarised moment in the History of France's Fifth Republic, as the far-right and far-left face compete for the Presidency, an office which enjoys enormous powers under the current French Constitution, all while Parliament has lastingly fractured into 3-4 political blocks unable to form any kind of working majority. Despite the election still being half a year away, the country has already entered full campaign mode, further inflamed by the compounding social movements and mass demonstrations, the historic wave of looting committed by organised groups of nigh-exclusively arab/black immigrants and French-born children of immigrants, and the complete political isolation of Emmanuel Macron, who is now the least popular President in modern French History, leaving behind a spiralling debt crisis and an untenable spending deficit that risks to unleash economic devastation in the coming years. As a francophone and former resident of France, I have been closely following French elections since Hollande got elected in 2012 and believe me when I say this upcoming election is unlike anything France has seen in living memory.
Returning to Houellebecq, it is fascinating to see the decline of one of France's greatest traditions - a shared respect and deference across the political spectrum for public intellectuals and figures of artistic merit. Famously, Charles de Gaulle demanded that all charges against Jean-Paul Sartre be dropped, arguing that "one doesn't arrest Voltaire" - despite Charles de Gaulle being a conservative nationalist and Sartre being a Maoist fanatic at the time. Despite the fiery content of his novels, Houellebecq is a largely mild-mannered, soft-spoken person, and I assume he won't use this opportunity to turn the trial into a larger demonstration of France's current crises: in a country in which all forms of ethnic and religious censuses are strictly prohibited, how can one be charged for matters regarding a Great Replacement, legally unprovable by design? He has already responded to his upcoming trial, warning against "a judiciary which increasingly believes it alone can decide social and political debates". If he actually receives a prison sentence (unlikely, it will probably be a fine), he would quite literally be a political prisoner, jailed for stating an unprovable opinion.
I no longer live in France, but I maintain deep ties to the country and appreciate it deeply, despite its chronic flaws and the severe shortcomings of its population ("French people are cattle when it comes to politics", as De Gaulle said). It will be fascinating to see how this trial takes shape. At any rate, it's a good time to reread Houellebecq's books.
StJohnOfPatmos
14d ago
Just mentioning the USSR's social conservatism undersells the matter: well into the 1980s, it was considered bizarre and dubious for a soviet man/woman to be unmarried at age 25. If they were still unmarried at age 30, they were basically a freak and complete outlier in their communities. The vast majority of soviet women married around age 20 - there was simply no time for a meaningful sexual revolution in the tiny time frame of 2 years of adult celibacy. Housing policy should be considered, too: it was extremely rare for young bachelor to live alone, most soviets transitioned from living with their parents to living with their partner without an intermediary phase. No cars, either - meaning very few refuges where a young couple could get it off without anyone finding out.
Soviet living conditions and domestic conservatism essentially prevented any meaningful sexual revolution from being possible - there was very literally neither time nor space for it.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Not if he's instantly replaced by even more dedicated hardliners who believe the exact same thing.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
You're absolutely right about survivorship bias, the vast majority of movies made in the "Golden Age of Hollywood" are tedious, boring kitsch. I would nonetheless wager that the average blockbuster big studio production of the 1920's-1950's was more artistically inclined, visually disciplined, and willing to take risks than their contemporary analogues. They are, on the whole, still substantially better and more interesting. Consider that Citizen Kane was a massive crowd pleasing box office sensation, directed by an unseasoned stage actor in his 20's endowed with a massive budget by a studio willing to take an enormous gamble - and is today considered a high watermark of American cinema to the point of being an elitist preference. We just don't see the stars align like this anymore in Hollywood, the corporate profit-incentive and the byzantine system of legally negotiated regulatory relationships between studios, the SAG, and unions has completely devoured the appetite for risk and exploration.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
If you’re referring to the Cold War propaganda angle of Queens Gambit, I didn’t miss it, it just isn’t interesting or notable. It’s there because the show needs an antagonist and a climactic showdown, and because it’s an obligatory period piece like so many uninspired productions nowadays. Had they placed the show in the 2000’s, the antagonist still would have been a Russian grandmaster, because Western audiences are familiar with that trope.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
My bad if I read your post wrong - I assumed it was a loaded question.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted?
Answering the question of what a faithful adaption of a Homeric Epic could even be would require an entire symposium of writers, historians, philosophers and artists - and I'm certain they wouldn't reach a consensus.
I think there's 2 paths for an adaption of the Odyssey that present themselves: one which seeks to closely express the narrative cycle of the story, in which case one could transfigure the story into any age or geographic setting, and one that delves more into the sense of distance and archaic strangeness of a world so removed from ours as the Homeric Age. The latter would essentially be an arthouse film, but what's the problem with that?
Fellini's Satyricon is usually held up as the premiere example of expressing how immeasurably far away we today are from Antiquity, its way of life, its expressions and conditions. https://youtube.com/watch?v=WrUpTliVq5c
The movie is strange, somewhat laborious to watch, but quite entrancing too. The people in it behave weirdly and the resulting sense of alienation highlights the distance between our world and theirs, which in an ironic roundabout way brings us closer to Antiquity than, say, Life of Brian ever could (since Life of Brian is really just a great comedy about religion overall, with very little actual historical interest).
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I don't mean to be a snob, but what is your level of exposure to cinema? I have serious doubts that someone who name drops Wicked as an example of a visually qualitative piece of art can really meaningfully contribute to the discussion, as it's such an indisputably cheap, commercial money-grab project that looks and sounds horrible from start to finish.
I mean, just look at this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=amgPXKrFZVg&list=RDamgPXKrFZVg&start_radio=1
The colour grading and lighting is amateurish beyond belief, the camera does NOTHING to match the rising rhythm of the song, the editing is either bored or downright sloppy - I see nothing of quality here whatsoever.
To exemplify what we mean by "declining quality", we can stay within the Musical genre (not my favourite, but for the sake of argument) and just look back 10 years at the way La La Land looked and felt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_8w9rOpV3gc
I'm not saying this clip is perfect beyond reproach, but look at how much they do with such a simple set-up! Great blocking, expressive colours, a smooth, sailing tracking shot that both drives home the intimacy of the moment and captures the rising, sweeping melody of the music. The visual humour of Gosling and Stone's characters going from tense and distant, to mocking each other's movements, to finally dancing together also feels effortless in its precision. Everything is in its right place.
Still staying within the Musical genre, we can go even further back and look at a scene from Singin' in the Rain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DPBKYwJo3nQ
Once again - look at how much the camera and actors can do with such a simple set-up! 3 men in a small, mundane rehearsal space, wearing normal clothing. The visual haptic quality of the colouring is impeccable, every surface feels graspable and delightful to the eye. The camera movement is disciplined and yet still feels free and light, the editing is dynamic and seamless, the actors positioning and motion makes every single frame look competently composed, there isn't a second of ugliness or excess to be found. And this is, once again, a scene of 2 guys singing and dancing while a third guy watches in a small, unremarkable interior. Massive Hollywood studios today shovel tens of millions of dollars into visual effects, luxurious costumes, huge set pieces, and yet the outcome still feels smaller and more constrained than extremely simple scenes from 50 years ago, because they simply do not know or do not care for using the capacities of the art form to their fullest extent. Great editing can make the most low-stakes situation seem gigantic. Likewise, bad editing can make a 1 million dollar set piece feel cheap and stuffy.
I know I'm being an arrogant prick - forgive me - but I desperately recommend expanding your horizon. There's so much great stuff out there in cinema, and none of it can be found in Wicked. I don't even really like Musicals as a genre! But even Musicals can be great examples of what moviemaking can accomplish.
As self-appointed judge, I sentence you to watch Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. You'll like it, I promise.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Counter examples: Dune, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger Games prequel), Project Hail Mary, The Boys (TV) I haven't seen, Poor Things, Wicked (I believe Wicked fans loved it for how it's faithful and enhanced the stage play), Mickey 17, The Housemaid, Running Man, Slow Horses (TV), The Queen's Gambit, I never saw Bridgerton but I heard good things. And so on.
I don't know if this is a great list of counter-examples...
Out of the movies I've seen in that list, only Poor Things strikes me as exceptional and encouraging for the future of the art form. Most of the others you mention fall in the category of "acceptable/mediocre" or, in cases like Dune, "good enough/enjoyable". Wicked is an incredibly ugly movie, no idea why it made this list - all the garish, cheap kitsch of Broadway blown up to the scale of the large screen.
The Queens Gambit is actually a great example of the dumbing-down of Hollywood, as it is a show about a troubled child becoming a chess prodigy that virtually never manages to showcase the game of chess itself in any kind of substantive matter. Seriously, rewatch the show. They namedrop various chess moves yet virtually never actually show them or allow the structure and development of a game to speak for itself. The camera in the Queens Gambit is literally afraid of lingering on the chessboard, lest the viewer actually take an interest in what is happening there - why should we need to see the protagonist get better at the game when we can just have a voice tell us "checkmate" while the camera pans to her opponent making a sad face? The Queens Gambit is not about chess - it is, like every trite and tired prestige show of the last 10 years, solely about trauma and the emotional labour of processing it, with some gender war slop mixed into it. Terrible, deeply anti-intellectual show and I'm glad the actual real-life female chess prodigy Nona Gaprindashvili succesfully sued Netflix for the way it slandered her legacy by namedropping her as someone "who never faced male chess players" (an utter lie) so that the fictional female American chess prodigy's victory would have more narrative impact.
I do think there are interesting and promising things happening on the margins of Hollywood and in cinema broadly speaking - Kane Parson's "Backrooms" movie was a bit of a letdown for me, but the videos on his Youtube channel are still astoundingly impressive, considering they are made by a single teenage individual using a simple rendering tool. Rendering and Visual Effects programs (and yes, also AI) becoming more accessible means that the most expensive art form in human history is being heavily democratised - the monopoly of cinema will no longer rest in the hands of a handful of greedy studios. We are already witnessing the rise of high-quality, high-concept short videos being made with the help of AI that can easily compete with much of what Hollywood has to offer in terms of visual and narrative quality, such as this series of AI videos made by an Italian filmmaker about a young boy documenting his grandmother, the last Giant of her island: https://instagram.com/leo_cannone/reel/Db8IvzCs5Lz/
I welcome the decline of Hollywood. I hope the big studios bet on all the wrong horses and incur tremendous financial misfortune. The art form will continue whether Paramount exists or not.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
Who is "they" here? Like two influencers posting rage bait?
I'm sure you're playing dumb on purpose to obfuscate the issue, but the recent vigil held for Arday in London included literal members of Parliament and the House of Lords as well as highly placed academics calling his death a lynching or the result of a witch hunt.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/diane-abbott-cambridge-mps-london-people-b1293737.html
As he addressed the crowd, Lord Woolley described the press coverage of Prof Arday as a “public execution” and a “lynching”, to cheers of approval.
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
I don't understand how this add-on makes the statement you're replying to false. Rape gangs chose vulnerable targets who didn't have much parental oversight - kinda obvious that those targets would be mainly working class and from dysfunctional households.
Why does the fact that many of these girls had previously been abused conflict with or deny the claim that much of the scale, perseverance and overall modus operandi these rape gangs were operating under very obviously were tied to the tribalism and ethno-religious chauvinism of the Pakistani, specifically Miripuri, diaspora?
The fact is that countless WOMEN within these communities were fully aware of what their male kinsmen were up to, but condoned it due to - in their own words - the victimized girls being outside of their community and faith. The mental tradeoff these diasporas operate under is very simple - "would sending a member of my family/clan to prison be better than a faithless outsider experiencing suffering at their hand? It would not, therefore I won't take action against it." This is how these rape gangs are allowed to operate with impunity - since quasi-everyone in the diaspora has some knowledge or involvement in it, combatting it by means of law enforcement would effectively engender taking legal action against the vast majority of the entire localized diaspora, which police nor politics won't do for obvious reasons. It's the exact same issue Europe has been having with gypsies for decades - trying to combat their criminality essentially means criminalising the entire community since the vast majority of them are criminals, accessories to the crime, or at the very least highly aware, yet unbothered by it.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
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No European electorate has ever voted for mass immigration.
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European powerbrokers have systematically lied and deceived their populations about the nature and scale of immigration - for example, the wave of post-Soviet states joining the EU in 2003 with "guarantees" that it wouldn't disrupt local labour markets - which it of course did.
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All polling, in all EU nations, in every decade going back to the 1950s (Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech polled at around 75% popular agreement when he made it), has consistently shown a clear rejection of more immigration - even Germany in 2015, at the height of pro-refugee mania, had a consistent majority polled saying the country could not handle the influx of people and that it would harm the country in the long-term.
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Establishment parties ranging from Macron's centrist LREM/Renaissance all the way to Meloni's "neo-fascist" FdI consistently make reducing the most undesirable forms of immigration a centre-point of their political campaigning, only to drop it the moment they enter elected office.
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Even when elected leaders actually decide to push through popular anti-immigration reform, they instantly falter before supra-sovereign EU institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, which they could of course easily contest or ignore, like Poland and Hungary did without issue, but mysteriously always choose to give up without a fight.
The main thing holding European electorates back from going all-in on anti-immigration politics is our bourgeois chauvinism against the extremely prole-coded far-right, which is loathed and despised less because of their specific politics, but because they represent and proudly adhere to the trashy, unsophisticated, non-college educated Kevins of European working class society. Most bourgeois/college-educated Europeans would probably literally rather have more immigration which they increasingly openly hate than be ruled by a segment of European society they consider irredeemably beneath them.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
Europeans democratically vote for politicians who pursue pro-immigration policies.
Wrong, they vote for politicians who campaign on reducing or reforming immigration and then pursue pro-immigration policy once in office. There isn't a single EU country that doesn't have a clear majority of voters demanding less immigration.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
It’s good that public figures are calling for calm. That is the most important part of their jobs.
It's certainly not the most important part of their jobs, what a strange idea - the most imporant part of an elected official's job obviously would be representing the interests of the people that elected them.
I also wouldn't summarize their reaction as "calling for calm" - they're calling for you, the citizen, not to think about these things too much and to let those in power handle it, i.e. allow them to continue business as usual. If they were "calling for calm", why do they insistently reroute these tragedies into hit-pieces about how evil the reaction of right-wingers and protestors is? That is the opposite of calming the situation, it actually inflames it considerably. Manufacturing a new enemy to distract from the actual barbarism that occurred is pouring oil on the fire.
StJohnOfPatmos
5mo ago
You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either.
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
I doubt it - he knows enough to know that Marat, Hébert, and Desmoulins began as writers/intellectuals and died violently, yet he somehow also is completely, fundamentally mistaken in how and why they died?
Especially Marat, whose death circumstances are exponentially more famous than anything he did while living, is a blatant example. He knows Marat was murdered in his bath by a vengeful aristocrat woman, because that’s as elemental to Marat’s life and legacy as suicide in the Führerbunker is to Hitlers or exile on Saint Helena is to Napoleons - you don’t know Marat without knowing that. And yet he uses his name as an example of French government repressing a public intellectual? Not believable for an instance that this is an honest mistake.
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