MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
The poetry-reciting Orc sounds like something in the tradition of Douglas Adams' Vogons. Except it won't be funny.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Hitchhiker's Guide
Was a radio show before it was a book. (Or at least the first two books were - the rather obscure later series of the radio show were based on the later books).
The BBC TV show is supposed to be an adaptation of the radio show, not the book. I'm not sure about the other material in the franchise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Lords of the Rings was pretty faithful to the books, and an excellent series of films, while the Hobbit was less faithful and much less good, although I can easily imagine a faithful adaptation that was bad, since I'd say the main problem with the Hobbit was that it allowed Peter Jackson complete control to bring out his worst impulses.
The problem with the Hobbit movies was the attempt to stretch the material to three films. I have a theory that Tolkien (and CS Lewis) had a secret sauce that the culture has now lost such that any attempt by moderns to flesh out the material he only sketched will fail - with the most visible examples being the Radagast and Dol Guldur scenes in the Hobbit and Amazon's execrable Rings of Power
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
31 years ago was 1995. It's easy to notice how much the norms and standards of academia, journalism, and general discourse around intellectual pursuits has noticeably changed in that time. Would a Jason Arday in 1995 have made it as far into Cambridge? I think a reasonable guess is No, he would not have made it as far and, in fact, there's a high likelihood that he wouldn't even have made it to the interview step in applying for the job.
In 1995 the only subjects Liverpool John Moores University (formerly known as Liverpool Polytechnic - they gained University status and the right to award their own degrees in 1992) offered research degrees in were sport science and certain engineering disciplines, so Arday would not have been able to get an education PhD at all. Unlike many of the 1992 universities, it didn't incorporate a teacher training college when established (although it now does). Training PE teachers was an obvious cash cow for an institution with a strong research-heavy sport science department, and Arday's Masters was in PE pedagogy. I wonder if he arrived at LJMU expecting to do PhD-level research in PE pedagogy and ended up playing the race card when he couldn't hack it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Feminists claimed to think that frat boys need this type of condescending propaganda in order to not rape people (I suspect they were lying and understood that the purpose of the propaganda was to humiliate). It was a few current things in the past, but back when Haven Monahan and his dastardly bros was the current thing, "We don't need to teach women to keep themselves safe, we need to teach men not to rape." was the feminist slogan du jour.
This is exactly what I would expect a deep state riddled with feminists to do if the tabloids said that something must be done about rape gangs, regardless of whether or not it is necessary or helpful. (And it definitely isn't helpful).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Wog poetry. Any true son of the soil knows that gypsies are worse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think e-Verify is already supposed to do this. As far as I can see, neither side of the fence thinks that it is fit for purpose.
And of course a system without biometrics cannot catch the case of an illegal immigrant using a valid name and SSN that were issued to someone else. (Remember that the photo on an ID card counts as a biometric, although it isn't the most reliable one).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Go back a few months and people would say that Iran would close the Straits and America would have no way to open them, and everybody in the world knows this which is why nobody before Trump ever attacked Iran. Really I think you're making my point for me.
If you have given up claiming victory and are just saying that the war was less of a disaster than online doomers predicted, I am happy to concede the point. The war has indeed been less of a disaster than online doomers predicted, and the Straits of Hormuz are indeed partially open in a way that they would not be if we had seen an Iranian victory.
As I have said elsewhere, this is what a draw looks like...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If her condition is treatable or self-limiting (as post-partum psychosis normally is) it makes all the difference in the world, because if she successfully pleads an insanity defence she will be released when she gets better.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If before the war you had told the average person that at the end of the war the Iranian regime would still be in power, that the Straits would be marginally less open to shipping than before the war, that there would be no change in the status of the Iranian HEU stockpile that had been buried under rubble a year earlier, and that the US had achieved this result based on a huge drawdown of hard-to-replace munitions stockpiles, this would be seen as a draw, and a net negative for the American national interest.
Bombing Iran, destroying its navy, killing its top leaders, dismantling its militias, and blockading its ports doesn't benefit America unless it also delivers a political goal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.
Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Good point. The Catholics protesting housing discrimination in Derry in the late 60's (and both sides agree that this is the flashpoint that escalated into the Troubles) explicitly modelled their movement on the US Civil Rights Movement. And Ian Paisley (who became the leader of the Protestant diehards) saw his role on the other side as part of the same spiritual project as the Southern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist/segregationist rearguard - he ended up on the board of Bob Jones University.
I think you could probably argue that the Days of Rage was the American troubles, just dramatically less troublesome.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The Straits were open before the war, and Iran's ability to project force across the Middle East involved individual men crossing borders clandestinely with guns and bombs, which is not a capability they have lost.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Trump is Texas Sharpshootering here. Before the war, he said that his political goal was regime change. During the war he is saying that he didn't necessarily mean that, and is keeping his real political goals secret in order to confuse the enemy. After the war, he is going to declare that whatever he got, particularly if it is status quo ante is a YUUGE victory and the thing he was looking for all along. But if Trump's real political goal was (as he will no doubt claim) opening the Straits of Hormuz, he could have achieved it much more cheaply by not starting the war in the first place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
This is a good post. I would go ahead to the obvious conclusion. The war is drawn. This is what a draw looks like. Neither side has a feasible path to a better outcome that status quo ante.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
After all, Europeans are the only people that managed to stop the trade of African slaves within the territories they controlled. As soon as they relinquished control of African territories, the slavery returned.
What do you mean by "Europeans"?
The British managed to stop the slave trade within the territories we controlled (which, by the second half of the 19th century, included the entire Atlantic) and so, belatedly, did the Yankees in the territory they controlled. The other Europeans didn't really bother until the Royal Navy made the trade dangerous and unprofitable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Very much so. Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.
Why do I say this? There was a constant, very real, threat of political violence over slavery from the 1820 Missouri crisis forward, that would eventually break out into large-scale political violence in 1854 (Bleeding Kansas) and all-out civil war in 1861. After the war, there was a failed white insurgency in the South (the 1st Klan) followed by a successful one (Redemption), such that the South was not consistently peaceful until Jim Crow was secured around 1890.
There is then a period of relative racial peace (in the "absence of violence" sense, not the "presence of justice" sense) as Jim Crow is uncontested, but this requires occasional pogroms to maintain white dominance, and is a period in which a violent criminal racist organisation (the 2nd Klan) ran Indiana and was a big political player in several other states.
I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.
And post-1970, the main forms of race-linked violence in America have been black-on-white crime, attempts by white vigilantes to stop it extra-legally, and attempts by Blue state and local governments to suppress white vigilantism. And crime in general, including black-on-white violent crime is dramatically lower than it was at the peak of the 1970s/80s crime wave.
So until MAGA and Woke started threatening political violence against each other, 2010s America had less race-linked criminal violence than at any time since the civil rights movement, and the post civil rights racial order featured no organised race-linked political violence and a lower threat level of potential political violence than previous racial orders.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I agree with both @lollol and @MathWizard - the median voter in the Anglosphere wants a secure border and minimal in-country enforcement (apart from the expeditious deportation of foreign criminals), and this doesn't work very well in practice. As well as the incentives point, illegal immigrants can arrive by overstaying tourist visas, not just by jumping the border - and before the current wave of "refugee" arrivals most did.
But I don't think this means you should be "pro-stock and pro-flow" or "anti-stock and anti-flow". Once we understand that you can't make sane immigration policy by pandering to the median voter, I think you should try to make policy in the national interest, and that means distinguishing between wanted and unwanted immigrants. The Canadian and Australian experience is that if you are visibly trying to do this (by which I mean actually trying, not pretending to try) the public will tolerate a reasonable number of mistakes. Trump, of course, is not doing this - almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea, but the administration (and its noisiest very online supporters) want to do it as a show of commitment to "deport them all". What is going on here - if we assume the administration is at least marginally competent, the answer is obvious - Trump's mass deportation policy is about putting on a show for his base, not about appealing to the median voter.
As a separate issue, effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data. (And once you have that, you effectively have ID cards even if you don't require people to routinely carry the card). The US basically has this, but it is split between various databases (particularly the SSA and State DMVs) in a way which makes using it for immigration enforcement ineffective. The UK doesn't, which is why we had the Windrush scandal when we tried to do serious in-country enforcement. I think the MAGA base would now support ID cards, but a noisy minority of Republicans profoundly wouldn't. But in any case, ID cards are less unpopular than either open borders or mass deportations of well-behaved settled illegals.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I much prefer the Warhammer version of this statistic - the UK exports more Space Marines than fish. (And the rump UK would become even more dependent on Warhammer for hard currency if London somehow did secede).
The UK fishing industry is tiny because there are so few fish left in the UK EEZ, and most of the rights to catch them well sold to Spanish commercial trawlers (who could pay more for the quota because they were more efficient catching the fish). It is traditional to blame the EU for this, but the cuts in quota due to overfishing would have happened whoever was in charge, and allowing retiring British fishermen to sell their quota to Spanish commercial operators rather than tying the quota to a specific port as most EU countries did was a Thatcher government decision.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Though London would have a reasonably strong negotiating position because as a matter of property law we own most of the infrastructure that makes the estuary navigable.
Aviation would be a worse problem - planes taking off from Heathrow would enter rump-UK airspace almost immediately and London's other airports are outside London. And obviously the rail link the the Channel Tunnel would become dubiously usable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
3,000 people is nothing
180,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for London to secede from the UK over Brexit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Most Barclays employees are going to be at 3 (Peon -> MD -> Jes Staley -> Epstein)
Anyone with a Clinton number of 2 has an Epstein number of 3, and that is a lot of people.
The guy was one of the best-connected people on the planet - he makes Paul Erdos and Kevin Bacon look like nobodies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
At least as regards speech restrictions, the historical evidence is that even rules that are intended to be used exclusively by ingroup against outgroup end up mostly being used to settle personal beefs within the ingroup.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity
I think I agree with you there - if Wexner was paying Epstein to run a Mossad-linked blackmail ring, he was using his own money and not Mossad's.
After the first two, the books get too long to make one movie per book while sticking close to the source material.
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