Lmao, fantastic. The US was never meant to have post-French-Revolution-style laicite, just a lack of a singular established church (that is, a government church akin to Anglicanism), as if the disgust and horror the same Founders who wrote letters discussing the topic had for the French Revolution didn't make it obvious enough. And Engel v. Vitale was the beginning of the progressive offensive against every tradition that kept American society (and indeed any other healthy human society) functioning which got rolling in the 1960s.
Because I'm sure someone else will bring it up, I'd like to point to the fact that yes, the Engel in Engel v. Vitale was a Jew. In fact the plaintiffs were all Jews (including one Jewish atheist who later claimed he was actually religious, in a way that makes him sound like a member of the Reform Synagogue of Satan) with the exception of a Unitarian, one of the original turbocucked fake '''''Christian'''' churches which has since merged into the even more openly hollow and vapid Unitarian Universalists.
The case was brought by a group of families of public school students in New Hyde Park from the Herricks Union Free School District who sued the school board president William J. Vitale, Jr.[7][8] The families argued that the voluntary prayer written by the state board of regents to "Almighty God" contradicted their religious beliefs. Led by Steven I. Engel, a Jewish man,[9] the plaintiffs sought to challenge the constitutionality of the state's prayer in school policy. They were supported by groups opposed to the school prayer including rabbinical organizations, Ethical Culture, and Jewish organizations.
The acting parties were not members of one particular religious persuasion, or all atheists. Their religious identities were legally identified in court paperwork as two Jews, an atheist, a Unitarian church member, and a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.[10] However, despite being listed in the court papers as an atheist, plaintiff Lawrence Roth, who was raised Jewish,[10] later denied that he was an atheist and described himself as religious and a participant of prayer.[10] When religious affiliation was discussed during preparations for the case, Roth claimed he was "a very religious person, but not a churchgoer" and that he said prayers but was unsure of what prayer could accomplish.[10] This resulted in the group's lawyer telling him "You're the atheist."[10] Roth later stated "apparently, you have to have an atheist in the crowd, so we started from there."[10]
Well, regardless of what this first wave of progressive shitbags were, whatever chips away at the victory which the devilish Warren Court handed them can only be a good thing. The Roberts Court, in the case of Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District astonishingly including Roberts himself, has struck at the very root of the cultural revolution the left have tried to force down America's throat for the past seventy years.
Conservatives despaired. As one conservative Christian wrote in 1965, the end of school prayer meant the end of American Christianity itself. The Schempp decision, he warned, was only the start of “repression, restriction, harassment, and then outright persecution.” From the conservative evangelical Biola University, near Los Angeles, President Samuel Sutherland concluded that the decision and the failure of a constitutional amendment signaled America’s transformation into “an atheistic nation, no whit better than God-denying, God-defying Russia herself.”
Yeah well, look at the state of America today. These oldschool fundies were right on the fucking money, just like the generation immediately after them would be spot-on when they predicted the consequences of the Sexual Revolution and gay marriage only to be mocked & ignored just as Israel & Judah treated the prophets who warned them of where their degeneracy would lead 1500-2000 years ago.
Come the next Great Awakening, American Christianity could really use its own Council of Nicaea to determine which churches are legitimate partners within an ecumenical but thoroughly actually Christian framework, and which are heresies to be designated enemies of true Christians & suppressed wherever they are found.
If the proto-Catholics and proto-Orthodox of Nicene & Chalcedonian times (for indeed there were already some pretty significant differences between the Western & Eastern Christians even back in the 300s) can work together to extirpate the Arians, Gnostics, Donatists, etc. I see no reason why even Trad-Caths, evangelical Southern Baptists and Pentecostal dominionists can't do the same against Episcopalian trannies, woke Methodists and those Lutherans who've been dumping Somalis into Minnesota for 30 years in our day and age.
I'm just glad fewer and fewer people give a shit about being called homophobes or transphobes or whatever the fuck -phobe and -ist these days, to the point where they're starting to cancel these degenerates on a local level, where the opposite would have been true just half a decade ago. Hope this goes national sometime soon this decade.
During the April meeting, Greenlee defended her staff members and reiterated that the library serves all patrons. She also explained why a tit-for-tat display of Christian and LGBTQ books would create additional inequalities. “If the library were to do as Ms. Kruckenberg asked regarding the 1:1 display of books about transgender people to God-approved cisgender people, this would result in biased displays,” Greenlee said. “To be equitable, we would also need to display books with multiple religious and non-religious views of gender, including Christian denominations and other religions that are inclusive of transgender people.” It was more of the same during the May Library Board meeting and Greenlee resigned later that month. When the Cedar Rapids Gazette asked Greenlee why she declined to comment.
Get fucked you deconstructionist piece of shit, Christ is King and I'm glad you've been hounded out of a job you've clearly been using to corrupt children & attack traditional pillars from religion to the two sexes.
Man, Resident Evil just can't catch a break as far as live-action adaptations go.
Neither Libya nor Egypt are parts of Europe, so they can hardly count for these Redditors' arguments.
Incidentally, during the Middle Ages the blacks in what's now southern Egypt & Sudan were Christian opponents of the Muslim Arabs, and eventually destroyed by them (and the Muslim Ottoman Turks). They certainly wouldn't have helped the latter invade other Christian kingdoms, such as Visigothic Spain or the (much closer) Byzantine Empire.
Even in the times of the Roman Empire, lighter-skinned North Africans considered themselves distinct from and looked down upon darker-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, of whom a few (so few that even many Romans-from-Africa were surprised by their existence) served in the legions. Like the Emperor Septimius Severus, an African Roman (of mixed Punic, ie. Phoenician/Lebanese + Berber, and Italic heritage hailing from modern western Libya) who saw an 'Ethiopian' (actually black) legionary and was shocked & appalled by the sight, thinking his presence to be a bad omen.
Lotta 'but the Moors!' types too. When the Moors weren't black, they were a mix of Arabs and Berbers (indigenous northwest Africans) who moved to Spain - ie. they may have been deeply tanned, but not black, and would resemble Middle Easterners more than any sub-Saharan black people. Those peoples still have a very low opinion of actual black Africans today, just ask the ones they're selling as slaves in Libya.
And even at their darkest Berbers (specifically Tuaregs, the Berber sub-ethnicity that lives furthest to the south in the Sahara) still look like this IRL. The ones who lived closer to the Mediterranean coast and thus would have been the most likely to migrate to Spain with the Muslim conquerors look more like this. (She can probably thank the Vandals, a tribe of Germanic barbarians who moved to North Africa & built a kingdom there during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, for her fair hair)
Worst thing is that there are genuine opportunities for 'representation' that would've made sense in-universe. Middle-earth isn't just Gondor/Arnor/Rohan/Mordor/Isengard after all. And in the Second Age? Fuck, we could've had a show set in Rhun, starring Jet Li or whoever as the Easterling king who would become Khamul (second-in-command of the Nazgul behind the Witch-King). Show us his struggles with his court & family full of characters played by other Asian actors as they argue for or against accepting the second of the Nine Rings delivered by Sauron, the internal conflict between his ambition and his sense of honor and how the former ultimately trumps the latter, the wars that may have driven him to take the Ring in hopes of using its power to protect his people only for it to ultimately hollow out & enslave him (as the One would have done to Boromir), etc.
Or if the Asians count as white today and you gotta have an all-black cast instead, it'd have been as simple as setting the show in Harad.
But no, Amazon had to shove the diversity into the places where it'd make the least possible sense and stick out the most. I've gotten to the point where I have to think this is deliberate, done on purpose to spite Tolkien's memory and fans, because it would have been as easy as visiting the Tolkien Gateway or any of the other LOTR Wikis (not even cracking open the books) to start figuring this stuff out.
I'm beginning to suspect that Bull Connor did nothing wrong.
Agreed. IMO this trailer looks much better put-together than the last ones but even within just the context of how they've been trying to hype RoP, Amazon has made wayyyy too many missteps and showed their hand too early through their media shills (including subverted fan groups like TheOneRing.net and the Tolkien Society) to possibly make up for it. The absolute cringy embarrassment that was the 'superfans' video alone is unforgettable, and unforgivable.
Speaking of shills, they seem to be out in force in the comments, and I'm sure in the LOTR subreddits too. For whatever good they might do Amazon at this stage.
Unfortunately Martin's world is poorly constructed, and the societies of Essos & Sothoryos make even less sense than the worst parts of Westeros' worldbuilding. The Dothraki for example, with their insistence on fighting unarmored and charging headlong into enemy formations over & over as their primary tactic (most infamously doing that eighteen times against an Unsullied phalanx, resulting in their crushing defeat even though they outnumbered those Unsullied like 8:1), should not realistically pose a threat to any enemy past the Stone Age.
Also, GRRM has been catching increasingly vitriolic attacks for 'orientalism' over the years thanks to how he depicts Essos/Sothoryos as, bluntly, a jumble of the most negative Victorian Era stereotypes of peoples like the Mongols & ancient Carthaginians than anything remotely accurate or sensible, when he isn't just writing a big question mark over them and declaring them to be a mysterious land that nobody sane would want to explore (Asshai, Sothoryos). I don't like it either (because it's shit worldbuilding) but I wouldn't call him a fascist over it as SJWs have and I can imagine why he wouldn't want to show, say, the Ghiscari in all their harpy-haired, stilt-walking, puppy-eating glory these days. Man almost certainly doesn't have it in him to muster up even the slightest response to the hate he'd get for it.
There's this amazing mod for the original Rome: Total War (a game that's almost twenty years old but still boasts a modding community many times larger than those of later TW games) that's made as a hypothetical sequel to the events of Lord of the Rings, appropriately titled Fourth Age: Total War. It was painstakingly put together by fans for free over 12 years (2007-2019, when the last patch came out) based on nothing more than Tolkien's scant few notes for a 'New Shadow' sequel which he ended choosing to never write, the appendices of Return of the King (same source Amazon is supposedly relying upon for Rings of Power) and the general lore in addition to their own conjecture for how a Fourth Age Middle-earth might look.
It's a decade-spanning labor of love and it shows, being one of the best LOTR games I've ever played. I have no doubt that vastly more care & passion went into it than Rings of Power, even though the creators had no more lore to work with than Amazon and probably actually a bit less (as I said, Tolkien barely wrote anything about his 'New Shadow' before deciding that actually he didn't want to write a sequel to LOTR after all). Their love for the Professor's work has not abated and now even though development on FATW is over, the dev team has immediately segued into making another LOTR mod for RTW set in a more canonical timeframe which has more lore in it, the Wainrider invasion during which Gondor was badly mauled and Arnor was already on its last legs.
I have no doubt that if Amazon possessed even one hundredth of the talent, determination and passion of this handful of devs on a dying forum for a nearly 20-year-old game, they wouldn't be getting a hundredth of the shit they're rightfully getting for Rings of Power, billion dollar budget or no.
How are people to trust her to protect the country when she would willingly murder hew own child?
They aren't. She and every single other 'soldier' like her isn't there to protect the country, they're rabid ideologues whose job will be to destroy it - to jump aboard the train of the Revolution and shoot their fellow Americans once their masters drop the mask of democracy altogether, no different than that other woman soldier who openly looked forward to putting anyone who wouldn't respect her authoritah in the ground a year ago.
The emotional validation she's been getting from ads like that one of the lady-soldier with two mommies and the people lauding her for her courage for posting this Tiktok video, I assume, is a nice bonus. But mostly they're there to convert the US military into the left's biggest and most deadly attack dog yet, and to serve as its cudgel against political enemies.
Welp, here's hoping that these scumbags prove about as effective as the Afghan Army's vaunted warrior-women. And that their story will ultimately end the same way.
My understanding is that while inflation was the original cause of this unrest (because it made gas and other essentials increasingly unaffordable), the situation only started to really spiral out of control when the government tried to force Sri Lanka's agricultural sector to go green.
I'm sure all those other factors, like inflation and Chinese investments with strings the size of the Himalayas attached, didn't help. But the government almost certainly could've weathered that storm for at least a good bit longer if it hadn't gone full retard over organic farming while in the middle of an international food & supply crisis.
This, if anything a Mexican equivalent to The Woman King would be the opposite. Starring some Aztec kween heroically battling the evil huwhite conquistadors to uphold her people's liberty to keep attacking their neighbors to gather human sacrifices to butcher in the name of their demonic gods.
As for the Dahomey Amazons themselves, the stronk black wimmin at the center of John Boyega's and Viola Davis' newest historical fantasy piece got their asses beat by the Europeans every time they fought the latter (and they fought whitey with guns, not machetes). So in fact they fit the role of 'comically evil but also equally hilariously incompetent and impotent pop-up bad guys to be effortlessly destroyed by the heroes' vastly better than the British and/or French who they'll presumably be slaughtering in this movie.
Best part of this saga is that the greatest example of an actually strong and heroic black female to have come out of colonial-era Dahomey was Sara Forbes Bonetta, a slave given by King Ghezo to the British envoy (who took her in because the alternative was that the Dahomey would've sacrificed her). Despite her horrific background, she became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria herself, married another self-made freedman business tycoon in British Nigeria and had kids with him, and got to live her life in wealth & luxury which her former tormentors could only dream of while their blight of a kingdom was rightfully burned down by the French.
Just like Roe v. Wade itself, founded on lies & hollow emotional manipulation to the core.
The first two episodes are basically a condensed recap of Volume 1, and honestly I prefer the way the Japanese have done it because they cut out the cringiest and most pointless content from that season (goodbye, Jaundice!) to keep things moving. However, this is just to get the show to a point (and probably bring new viewers up to speed) where Studio SHAFT can start their own original storyline, which they do in Episode 3.
Honestly, the show's been rolling downhill at increasing speed in just about every metric since Monty Oum died. The Faunus-human conflict turning out to be an absolute dud was just one factor in its decline.
My hope is that after Ice Queendom (and probably Volume 9, which has just been delayed into next year...) finishes airing, the new penny-pinching management at Warner Bros-Discovery will sell the IP off to SHAFT or really just about any other studio prior to shuttering Rooster Teeth so it can be rebooted, it's mind-boggling how they've made such an absolute mess out of something which started out with so much fun potential back in 2013. It'd be very difficult to do worse than they have.
The racism angle was so poorly handled in the original RWBY anyway, that I can't imagine anyone would want to copy it 1-for-1. Besides this instance of Weiss bashing the Faunus animal-people (which she does because, per her lines, Faunus terrorists murdered her relatives and associates), Rooster Teeth seemed to be genuinely terrified of portraying any actual anti-Faunus racism. The worst I can remember them going is a single Faunus rights protest that turns into a small riot (mentioned in passing only) and having Cardin pulling another student's rabbit ears, which barely counts since he's supposed to be a bully toward everyone anyway, and both of these happen very early on in the series. Hell, the headmaster of the main academy in Volume 5 is himself a lion-themed Faunus.
Really takes the bite out of the White Fang when it doesn't seem like there's any oppression to justify why the Faunus should even want or need a Black Panther equivalent. There's nothing like Jim Crow, no Remnant equivalent to sundown towns, no city-leveling riots, no segregated water fountains or public transportation, Blake can openly eat at the same table as the rest of Team RWBY even after revealing that she's a Faunus, etc. The decision to turn Adam from a determined revolutionary into an incel with a raging hateboner for Blake with no regard for his previous characterization just made something that was already awful even worse.
IMO that Studio SHAFT had Weiss openly go 'all Faunus are thieving terrorists' and actually get called on it by Yang instead of the latter simply going 'well that's not necessarily true' like an enlightened centrist already promises an at least slightly better take than the original, whereas Rooster Teeth seemed as though they couldn't decide whether to actually commit to their racism angle or just dance around it (for what, fear of offending their fellow liberals in Austin if they misstep?) and ended up crapping out something totally inconsistent.
I hope this results in SCOTUS getting so pissed that they decide in favor of nationwide constitutional carry as the only way to go and also strike down the 1934 National Firearms Act while they're at it, just to spite New York & California as hard they did the Dobbs leaker. (Or as hard as they did New York & California when they killed the former's Sullivan Act with Bruen just now, for that matter)
Why it's Never Let Evil Take Root, featuring a patriotic and self-sacrificing 17-year-old protagonist who saves his homeland from being taken over by a Bolshevik who had just praised the genocidal tyrant ruling across the sea with a single, highly public act of heroism. I do believe he's one of the most inspirational characters of early animes from the 1960s.
(The joke refers to this guy. And yes, the dude getting stabbed was indeed a big fan of Chairman Mao, to the point where even his fellow Communists were uncomfortable)
Yes indeed. A shame that his American contemporaries either actively worked to undermine their country or allowed their peers to do so, rather than following in his hallowed footsteps and shanking the likes of Herbert Marcuse on live TV.
Embracing healthy sexual norms to own the chuds.
I'm lovin' this almost as much as I love the libs who have gone full mask-off and are now yelling 'FUCKING CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS, I HOPE YOUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS GET RAPED & IMPREGNATED BY A HORDE OF FERAL NIGGERS' on social media.
Not necessarily, bastards could do reasonably well for themselves in medieval Europe for example. Obviously it helped if they were of noble or royal birth, but even commoners weren't treated as worthless and could get help from the Church (up to and including getting a primitive form of child support from the father, if identified). And of course, most famously one bastard conquered England while another took over Castile (central Spain), three hundred years apart.
The 'bastards are completely worthless scum with no rights and their mothers are degenerate whores with zero redeeming features' dealio was more-so a feature of the Early Modern period (with its attendant rise of Puritanism and other similarly hardline sects of Protestantism) than the actual Middle Ages, like most other things George RR Martin wrote down for edginess' sake and then tried to pass off as 'realistic'.
I'll accept responding to Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion on a case overturning nationwide gay marriage with a solemn 'we deserved this' and combating the many fellow queers who will inevitably disagree as a bare minimum. Alongside the Dobbs decision, it will represent the first concrete step on the long, long road to once more re-stigmatizing deviant sexual behaviors and promoting healthy norms that actually positively contribute to a civilization's survival.