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Notes -
How about some television talk.
I was looking for a show to watch on a second screen while I played the new Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter and came across Slow Horses - BBC spy show about MI5 and a group of remedial agents. My parents have been watching for years and always recommend it. I loathe most modern television but for whatever reason decided to give it a shot.
It’s very much as expected. The first half of season 1 is all about a “loathsome” right wing terrorist cell, the Sons of Albion. Get this - these right wing youths kidnap an innocent British British-Asian boy and plan to behead him live on the internet in an ISIS style video. But wait, it’s actually a rouge opp carried out by the evil girlboss intelligence minister. They then do a double fakeout where the Sons of Albion get wise to the setup and the scary right wing guy goes on a rampage and attempts to carry out the beheading.
This is a completely ludicrous plot line and it appears that Apple’s Slow Horses is going to be every bit as awful as I expected for a show developed after 2016. Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?
For anyone here who’s watched it, does Slow Horses get better? Is there anything of value here?
I’m separately on season 4 of Le Bureau des Legendes - a French foreign intelligence tv drama produced by Canal and very highly regarded by anyone in the Anglosphere that’s seen it. It’s the show that Paramount’s The Agency is based on. And I must say the The Bureau is truly excellent. Season 1 aired in 2015 so it’s only mildly annoying with politics. Very mild. It’s really great and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I have a lot of thoughts on it that I can share if anyone is interested. But it reminds me a lot of 24, with less action and more drama.
The number 1 rule of Hollywood is that they will never show an accurate representation of who is actually commiting crime/terrorism and who the victims are. Just look at decades of Law and Order and the defendants they showed.
Related, notice how the news media can carefully manage to never mention who is actually disproportionately committing violence against trans prostitutes, or causing so many Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or engaging in sex trafficking of minors. Somehow, all those problems are caused by SocietyTM (aka white people) instead of the perpetrators commiting the crimes.
There was a L&O SVU episode a couple of decades back about a couple who were keeping an impoverished third-world woman as a slave.
The show had the couple be white. Every single instance of this scenario I've heard about has the "owners" the same ethnicity as the slave, but wealthy. Can't have Third World immigrants be portrayed as the bad guys, though, not even rich ones!
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