Tanista
20hr ago
This is still true today in poorer countries. The word for a married woman and a married woman with status are different in our language. What status? Almost always that they have servants.
Tanista
20hr ago
Obviously the West saw what was happening during the Ukraine War and the result was to a) pass over it in silence or b) complain that transwomen were not allowed to defect from their sex and leave
Tanista
20hr ago
Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.
You can also mention the massive purge of the military before the war and the subsequent mess they were in when it started.
Aren't even low IQ women better at reading faces and emotions than high IQ men?
I guess that feels nebulous compared to Science^(tm) and hand-eye coordination but it matters a fuckton in the real world.
There are also obviously other things (e.g. leveraging sexuality) but this doesn't play well with old or new moral codes and it has a shelf life
Tanista
20hr ago
I think we're so many decades down from moral education that people believe at least some of it. Which seems to function as being forced to profess belief in all of it because you cannot deny bits and pieces of the blank slateism without being at risk of destruction.
People don't want female firefighters or Marines, but the inability to be honest without threatening the apple cart makes it impossible to check people who exploit the legal system to push us just one step further (unless something truly absurd happens like a Lia Thomas situation that cannot be ignored - but even in that case people are likely benefitting from Title IX being explicitly about sex so these attempted redefinitions can run into a hostile court).
Groups are actively leveraging this. It's very common with the trans stuff. There's constant claims that black women will suffer from going back to sexed bathrooms (yes, the new left wing take is that black women are so manly banning men will keep them out). Similarly, a common line of attack is that you're an essentialist and being essentialist is bad because what next? Race essentialism? If sex is real, why wouldn't someone argue race is real?
If they never believed in any of this none of this would have force. That poor professor who got fired for being frustrated at how badly her black students are doing wouldn't have been frustrated or have any cognitive dissonance at all.. You think Amy Wax is losing sleep over it?
That's why it's so difficult to dislodge this gender ideology stuff. Everyone is trapped in the same lie. No one can stand outside of it in the simplest, most expedient manner ("men are men and women are women and, frankly, the government shouldn't be involved") robs them of their own tools and stories.
Tanista
1d ago
The "deconstructing Skywalker supremacy " stuff is also only in hindsight. JJ had no idea who Rey's parents were in TFA (Rian could have done anything he wanted there - simply have her be a particularly force sensitive child) and the EU is also full of non-Skywalkers having their moment. Which makes sense, because the core movies are about one set of characters.
We've discussed how other parts of it, namely Holdo's costuming, are both derivative and miss the point of what they're drawing from.
Tanista
1d ago
I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels.
It's a relay race. It doesn't matter if, in isolation, TLJ was the least bad. It was so bad that it hobbled TROS (it's pretty damning that the studio that hired you basically wiped your contribution so it isn't really even a fan thing) so there's really no point talking about it being better than it.
TROS was fucked anyway for a variety of reasons (Fisher dying,the hiring and firing of Trevorrow) but TLJ gave it no good lead in.
Abrams made a hack's movie but you're just never convince me that it isn't malpractice to throw out everything that even looked like set up in the second part of a trilogy when you had no say in how the third part would go.
This is a mistake that happened all over the EU. And in Doctor Who, where people grew up so enamored with their vision of what DW is that they squeezed it in instead of accepting that the canon and fandom was where it was. Sorry, you're in a relay race, you don't get to have it your way.
Johnson has to eat most of the blame. Or rather, Kennedy has to get it for allowing Johnson to do this.
Tanista
1d ago
If they're doing end-runs I don't see why you'd be surprised that the whole "equal protection" bit has clear caveats on who gets discriminated against. The logic is there to hunt down racists who got slightly smarter after the end of segregation after all.
In other countries (Canada) they just make this clear but people have to be smarter in America.
The Democrats don't percieve their lawfare as unprovoked, at least not the rank-and-file and the voters.
Letitia James actually is the one example where you can actually get prominent Democrats to admit that it may have been a bit much. I think because of the business element (not every Democrat is some rich-hating socialist, many actually have skin in the game) and the fact no one wants this to be the precedent set (that and going around talking about "getting" Trump)
I think this is partly hindsight. Anything from NY either didn't harm Trump or actively backfired and they can always tell themselves that the other cases were just, just slow or badly handled.
Fani Willis is corrupt and incompetent but, in comparison,I don't think most of the base thinks that Trump is innocent of trying to influence the election.
Tanista
5d ago
He is not exactly given a choice. Voldemort tries to kill him from the first year he's in Hogwarts. It's not expectations, it's survival. I don't think he cares about how people who don't know him perceive him. He just doesn't like being in danger and doesn't like his new friends being in danger.
I've seen a lot of complaints from fanfic authors that Harry can appear suicidally lackadaisical about his studies (though he's most interested in DADA which is appropriate). Without Voldemort he'd probably be a normal kid who's maybe good at Quidditch (like his dad).
Yes. Whether or not I find this stuff to be stupid cope IRL (I did amuse myself watching Muslims trying to figure out how to fast in northern regions with very short spells of sunlight) it can actually add a bit of reality to the character and world.
Utopian scifi needs to get over its religious hangup.
Tanista
5d ago
I mean, to be fair, it did work with German scientists. Unfortunately, people die.
The real question is how much the current immigration system actually resembles that.
My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
If you've convinced yourself that how we talk and what we consume determines reality why would you not fight over every crumb? The trigger for Basecamp offering employees who were offended at a list making fun of customer names buyouts to purge the company was an ADL pyramid that started with light mockery on the bottom and genocide on the top. If you believe this shit, then you should try to fight for every minor space no matter how dead it seems.
It's actually a great way to get otherwise politically inert people - or people who don't care to do any of the ugly tedious work of real politics - to feel like they're doing something. They can help where they are. Your hobby isn't childish or simply irrelevant to important matters, it's another way to do good.
feel like culture war dead-enders who are trying to produce content.
A few celebrities have jumped in. Interestingly, no Americans. They're all from the anglosphere. Ruby Rose has no career so her bitterness makes sense. Dan Stevens never really hit the big leagues in America after leaving Downton but he still had good movies like The Guest and Apostle and apparently Legion. Aime Lou Woods just had a good turn on the trendy White Lotus.
Nothing really seems to unite them. They seem to range from has-beens to actually successful. Maybe it's just random internet addiction/radicalization.
Tanista
5d ago
I'm not even sure it holds for the pre-Christian world? The philosophers at the time criticized the traditional depictions of gods as immoral and you could go to a philosophy school or learn something like Stoicism parallel to your existing religion and not replacing it. Religions did have moral content (the first commandment being to be good to your god so they'll be good to you) but they don't seem to have been totalizing.
The inordinate focus on morality in all dimensions seems to be a particularly Judeo-Christian thing.
He wants to be a hero, to soak up all this adulation and special treatment that he's been craving all his life, and it's down to him being basically a decent kid and making the right friends that manages to steer him along the right path.
Problem is that JK speaks through a magical macguffin and the Mirror of Erised makes it clear that his real desire is to be with his family.
It's Ron who sees himself as a hero who finally outshines his many brothers when he looks at it. Harry simply doesn't seem to value that in the same way, which makes sense because he already has fame and adulation and it has nothing to do with him: in his mind his fame is unearned, creates insane expectations and is frankly grotesque in that it was born out of the death of the life he could have had.
To try to reconcile both views: I think Harry's drive is less about getting the adulation of being a hero and more just a sort of instinctive mistrust of authority figures and the sense that he should do things himself (he also doesn't like the idea of friends suffering for him which is how Voldemort finally gets him). It being a YA novel, he's at least sometimes right which makes things worse.
But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain.
This brings to mind Bill Burr's joke (responding to claims that commentators over-index on black sportsmen's athleticism compared to whites and not their intelligence):
You're acting like we can't be scientists.
"No. All I'm saying is, if there was a race to the microscopes, you fuckers would win!"
It doesn't matter if you don't labour for material gain. You have or don't have the advantages you have. If there's two groups of people competing for the few jobs studying 14th century Buddhist mandalas the ones with the higher IQ probably have an advantage.
Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate.
No, the argument would be that almost everyone has to work because most of us don't have nest eggs and our economy doesn't favor the people who drew the short straw cognitively (who knows, maybe AI will flip this). And people naturally resent this.
And how do we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society.
Ah yes, the old "who's to say?" I think this is the fat acceptance of intelligence discourse.
Tanista
8d ago
I think it is a Democratic loss, though a few more victories like this and the Republicans are undone.
I think Democrats are looking at the polling and recent elections and figure there's no need to risk themselves. Trump is and will continue screwing himself in their eyes, the subsidies will expire anyway and he'll be blamed and they'll win the midterms.
We're supposed to pretend that such moves done in the past by Republicans weren't seen as massively norm breaking and a violation of normal politics?
It is literally called "the nuclear option".
Hell, Democrats cried bloody murder (and still bring it up with no small amount of bitterness*) about simply not holding a vote for Garland.
* Understandably. I'd be mad too if I allowed myself to be so outplayed.
Tanista
9d ago
Republicans have a Senate advantage. It's by no means clear that nuking the filibuster (especially in Trump's term) is a good idea in the long run.
Though I grant it'd allow Democrats to pull more shenanigans like the ACA subsidies and then dare Republicans to take away the gibs.
Tanista
9d ago
It's one group that doesn't trust the BBC and another group that insists that, yes, the BBC has problems but it's also the bulwark against barbarism and the target of a nefarious right wing plot (sotto voce: maybe driven by American lackeys) to destroy it. A similar dynamic exists with the CBC: any talk of funding becomes a matter of the sort of paranoid patriotism that would otherwise be mocked from the other side.
So I think the situation is actually worse for the BBC than uncritical trust of half the electorate. They don't even have that.
Tanista
10d ago
Is that actually the explanation or is that (the oldest) fanon?
Obviously 007 is a codename but "James Bond" being a codename (is "Felix Leiter" also a codename? Do all Bonds and Leiters end up as friends?) doesn't seem to have ever been canon AFAIK. The Craig Bond films certainly reject it.
It just seems like canon just doesn't matter that much to Bond. New actors allow soft reboots and that's that. Getting tangled up in the history is how you get a mess like Spectre or the need to give a definitive ending in No Time to Die. I'm not sure that form of modernization is actually better. That's how you eventually end up with MCU kudzu-canon.
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more. You already lost anyone who wanted to see something truly different in the reintroduction. After that, you lost anyone who was even theoretically interested in Snoke or the rest of that shit or was holding on to it as a consolation.
This sort of thing is not unknown. The EU writers used to have shitfights and problems too. For Legacy of the Force Karen Traviss was essentially writing her own fanfictions with very strong opinions (Jedi are evil, virile Mandos are gods, basically). She went too far, other writers then took time to deconstruct her bullshit (specifically Troy Denning just having the Mandos absolutely wiped out lol). But, at the very least, the general story continuity was maintained. They only got to editorialize within that. Major decisions were cleared above.
I don't know what went wrong here: Lucas specifically picked Kennedy because she had a lot of experience producing and he figured she'd defend the integrity of Star Wars. She's defended it as her fiefdom but she seems to have no real sense or preference for where the trilogy should go (beyond the usual "diversification") if she just allowed each of these directors to do whatever they wanted. I think it may be that she worked well with Lucas and Spielberg because they had strong creative visions and simply couldn't provide her own and deferred to the creatives out of habit.
Abrams was never supposed to return. It was supposed to be three different directors. Someone else could have taken the plots that existed from TFA and not gone "psych!". Like, Johnson didn't just not give fulfilling answers to Abrams' mystery boxes, he called you stupid for caring and then fucked off leaving you nothing else to care about. Seriously, what did he build? Rose Tico?
Let's grant Abrams is a hack. As matter of numbers imo TFA simply didn't kill the franchise (well...I think he killed Star Wars' best shot at becoming an MCU-like phenomenon in China) or TLJ would have opened much worse. TLJ however did have bad legs and TROS didn't open well either (though obviously Abrams owns the legs here)
This isn't only my judgment: the higher-ups clearly think TLJ was a failure which is why they pulled the alarm and brought Abrams back.
I remember watching Brick as a kid and being blown away. He's actively regressed and that might explain why he did so badly with Star Wars. Sad.
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