The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
I mostly agree with you about the miniseries, I think it wasn't great as an adaptation, but it's a favorite of my mother and I, one of the first "adult" books she gave me when I was a teen, and I'd previously gotten her the Orson-Welles TV miniseries for her birthday years ago. So it was event viewing for us, we watched an episode every few days with the kind of vaguely-Asian food that nods towards the concept while being edible to my boomer parents. So I enjoyed it for the bonding and seeing one of my favorite stories on screen, but the de-centering of Blackthorne was a weakness. He needed to be: A) Freakishly tall, B) Blond, C) Super Hot.
RE TNC: I like his writing and find him interesting, even if I don't agree with him on everything. The Message isn't a book that's meant to prove his moral postulates, it's a book that is meant to take his liberal-left premises as a given and then apply them to the situation at hand. If you're reading The Message and you want to contest his premises, then the book doesn't really have much for you. The fact that Hughes in that review can't grok to the fact that the book is framed as a series of lectures at his alma mater, hence the "comrades," makes me distrust the review in general; but I find house slaves like Hughes obnoxious so that might be a personal dislike.
The Message is a work of theology, and like any work of theology it doesn't need to start with Genesis. TNC makes a bulletproof argument, in my view, that if one views the segregationist South's sheriffs and Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans as unqualified evils, then one is also obligated by one's own liberal moral code to view modern-day Israel-Palestine as evil and wrong. It punctures the myth that the Holocaust absolves Israel's sins today, "your oppression will not save you."
Of course, if one disagrees that Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans were a bad thing, or that Sundown Town Sheriffs telling car travelers to move on outta here before you get into trouble were bad people, if one thought that being a perpetrator was better than being a victim and NEVER thought that anyone's oppression would save them, then TNC's argument holds no logic for you. Any more than reading an argument about whether Marijuana is halal will make any sense to you if you think Islam is the ravings of an epileptic whose rich wife took a consolation-diagnosis from a passing monk too seriously.
I can understand and appreciate either side of the argument. People who have nostalgia for Apartheid and support Israel, or people who worship Mandela and oppose Israel. What gets stuck in my craw here is people who worship Mandela and support Israel, and I think TNC does a good job of arguing against them by their own logic.
Not sure where the "house slave" comment came from; that's surprisingly uncharitable from you, but maybe he (or I) wound you up.
Your either/or argument here doesn't move me, actually, nor do your analogies, but it's an interesting perspective.
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