ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Here’s my gripe with the way Chani is portrayed in the movie. In the movie, she just seems to straightforwardly hate Paul. She starts out as scornful and dismissive, is immediately suspicious of his political motives, which then curdles into hatred. She refuses to cry for him when she thinks he’s dead (Jessica has to force her to) and is even about to try and kill him just before he declares himself the Lisan al-Gaib. It’s so consistent and intense that the exactly two short scenes where they’re friendly and in-love seem totally out of place, like they’re deleted scenes made from an earlier draft of the script that the editor forgot to remove. It also totally deflates any of the drama and Pathos we’re supposed to feel about the film’s ending. Why the hell would Paul even consider picking Chani over Irulian? And why would Chani be so upset that she’s not going to spend the rest of her life with the guy she basically thinks is the Antichrist?
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Changing birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since it was created by a choice of wording in the 14th amendment. So you yourself are probably fine. Your mom should probably talk to an immigration attorney regardless of who ends up president.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I think RFK could end up being pretty bad for the Democrats. Many of his policy positions are conservative adjacent (anti-vaccine, pro-Israel). But the real risk is low-information Democratic voters getting to the polls and seeing the name “Bobby Kennedy Jr.” on the ballot. That’s why Democrats have been freaking out about him so much more than Republicans lately.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
About a year or two ago there was a article published in a medical journal by two notable medical ethicists evaluating the possibility of infanticide, calling it “post-birth abortion” and coming down in favor of it.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
If you are a Democrat, you would probably be better off sitting this one out and letting Biden lose. If he wins, it just sends the message to the Democratic Party that they can run more and more brazen and unqualified neoliberal establishment ghouls that won’t give you anything close to the policies you actually want. You need to show them that you will draw the line somewhere, and that they actually need to give you something to win your vote. Even if you find Trump distasteful and scary I think you can look back at the four years of his last term and see that a lot of the fretted-about nightmare scenarios your side was concerned about never actually happened.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Honestly I am beginning to drift towards the position you described in your last paragraph. Deep State rigging for Biden in 2020, Deep State rigging for Trump in 2024. I think the Deep State might have decided it’s better to get Trump in the Oval Office to get middle America on board for World War III. They would have to undertake some maneuvers to get Trump personally on board for a war, and to contain his domestic political impulses, but I think they believe they can do that. That might be easier for them to manage than the French Revolution nightmare scenario of a simultaneous existential foreign war plus a hot civil war at home.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Say what you will about HRC, but she did not contest the outcome of the election for the next four years
Well, Hillary never stormed the capitol with her army of fanatical HillDawgs(tm), but she (and the mainstream media) did spend four years strongly implying that Russia had rigged the elections in Trump’s favor. An argument that they kept on using until about a day after Biden’s victory in 2020, after which the argument that any American election had ever been stolen immediately became a laughable conspiracy theory. Twenty years of carping about dimpled chads in Miami Dade county also suddenly went down the memory hole.
Because America shouldn’t be like Iran, where you are free to vote for any of the six candidates hand-picked by the Guardian Council.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I think those people have been in quite a lot of struggle sessions where the very suggestion that Biden might be a little bit over-the-hill is laughable Drumphist propaganda and if you humor that idea it’s a sign that you may be a dangerous racist sexist fascist who needs to be voted off the island. But now they have a moment where the conditioning is broken by intense public ridicule and the scales fall off.
The thing is, I think people on the Motte are overall going to be more charitable to Biden than the average normie voter, even if we don’t like him. Because we have access to a much less tightly controlled info-space. We’ve probably all seen a bunch of compilations of his sentences turning into gibberish, or him talking about how he’s just met a world leader that’s been dead for twenty years, or having to be physically turned around at an event because he’s facing the wrong way. To us, his debate performance would seem about normal, better than average for him even. For most people it’s not like that. If you’re a not particularly plugged-in liberal, your only exposure to him is two State of the Union addresses that he was drilled on for months and read off a teleprompter, and carefully edited CNN clips of his best moments, where he seems quite bright and energetic. For those people, to see him in an unscripted environment and notice that he really does occasionally have trouble finishing his sentences, and sometimes loses his train of thought is very shocking and disturbing.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
North Korea has officially committed to sending troops to Ukraine. These troops are expected to begin arriving in Ukraine within a month. At the moment, it’s just one engineering brigade. That’s probably true, although I am reminded of the “armed Cuban construction workers” that US troops encountered when the United States invaded Grenada.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
IIRC the vox pop shots at the beginning with the people complaining about the “aliens” was repurposed real news footage of interviews with people from Joburg talking about the immigration crisis.
The main reason that the United States and China both want Taiwan is that Taiwan is what allows the US to potentially bottle up the Chinese navy and keep them out of the South China Sea. It’s primarily important as a naval asset. Almost no one talks about this. China has to get Taiwan back if it ever wants to be a great naval power. If China gets Taiwan back as a smoking ruin, without TSMC, without the economy, without the people, it would still be worth it.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I know George R. R. Martin gets a lot of flack now as being Reddit trash for midwits, but I think his parable of the sellsword is a really excellent and pithy little exploration of the nature of power and political legitimacy. I will post a variation of it below:
In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies? "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword. "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel." "That piece of steel is the power of life and death." "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?” Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.” “A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
The left has already picked the next batch of sacred cows, it’s just rather muted since the security organs object to the fact that most of the new herd are on international terrorism lists and violently opposed to US interests.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
It started with the supply chain issues after COVID. Dealers didn’t want colored cars, because they wanted to avoid a situation where they only had three cars of a certain model in stock and two of them were niche colors that most buyers wouldn’t want. So they started ordering only gray, white and black models. The manufactures took note of this and started making more gray, white and black models and fewer brightly colored models. This in turn made the colorful ones more expensive and harder to find, and so even fewer people bought them. So now most cars on the road are gray, white and black.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
On the North Korea point, there have also been three small North Korean incursions into the DMZ, which led to shooting incidents. A few North Korean soldiers died or were injured, but it appears that was from a land mine they accidentally triggered and not South Korean fire.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I’ve noticed this effect with coffee. I love the smell of coffee in the morning, but I hate it in the evening. It could be because I associate the smell of coffee in the evening with some hellish all nighters I’ve pulled.
In the sense that they’ve burned most of their international credibility, failed to contain an insurgency in a sealed area the size of Las Vegas, taken over two thousand unrecoverable military casualties, failed to rescue most of the hostages, and run through most of their preexisting munitions stockpiles, because HAL-9000 keeps telling them to bomb random apartment complexes instead of anywhere Hamas actually is.
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