Times like these, it's worth noting the Taliban actually temporarily ended the practice of bacha bazi (rape of feminized underage boys on a mass scale) in Afghanistan by killing the people indulging in it - and this crackdown was one of the reasons why the Afghan populace preferred them over the warlords preceding them.
It only came back because of the Coalition invasion, as those same warlords have become our valiant allies in defending Democracy™ and Human Rights™ and Coalition forces have been ordered to turn a blind eye to their habitual boy-rape for the past 20 years we've been in A-stan. Vice did a rather famous documentary about it back when they still did anything remotely resembling journalism at all.
Not necessarily: although generally quite anti-woke, Asian countries & cultures are also very big on obeying the established authorities, and if those authorities should mandate vax passports, well...as Japan is doing, BTW.
The list of places to flee grows thin indeed. Maybe Botswana, which is one of the very few functioning & livable African countries and got that way because they actually reconciled with & integrated their white inhabitants. But tbh, I'd encourage organizing locally to resist wokedom's march and try to preserve normality wherever you live, or at least move into a red state if you're American & have the bad luck of living in a blue one. If the US falls completely, I don't think there'll be anywhere to run.
Normally the ones in power, like Rutte here, have to at least make a cursory effort to not sound like a Sauron/Zod knockoff though. If this guy, who is apparently what passes for a 'conservative-liberal' in the Netherlands, is going full mask-off - for better or for worse, we're almost certainly already in the globalist endgame (something I think is also made clear by Canada finally openly becoming a woke dictatorship & shedding all remaining pretense to the contrary).
"My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue," he [Rutte] said.
Imagine speaking like this and still thinking you're the good guy. And/or not a massive faggot.
Well, that's why the first thing the next populist administration (an if so big it's the size of Jupiter, I know...) needs to do is to purge every department and start installing people whose loyalty to anti-wokeness is undoubtable, just as the left has been doing for decades and which is exactly what Trump failed to do from the get-go.
Whether it's Michael Flynn or Alex Jones or Vox Day or random ITGs who post fantastically detailed 20,000-word sadistic fantasies about what they'd like to do to any Antifa they can get their hands on in the Redstate or Breitbart comment section - doesn't matter, I'm sure even the latter can do a vastly better job than the average federal bureaucrat at this point. Gotta learn from the harsh lessons of the Trump administration: nothing you do, from attacking CRT to trying to withdraw the troops from senseless forever wars abroad, will have any effect until you've gutted and replaced the people responsible for carrying your orders out from top to bottom and bottom to top.
Jill is canonically not even a 'pure' white person - she's been explicitly said to be ethnically half-French and half-Japanese by Capcom since the original RE1 way back in the mid-90s. The Redfields were also part-Mohawk in George Romero's script for the first Resident Evil movie, which wasn't great IMO but still better than what Anderson's Alice-centric franchise turned out to be. So any Resident Evil media being made by the West already could've been organically 'diverse' without blackwashing anyone.
But then it's never about that, is it. And it certainly wouldn't satisfy the Wakandan wannabe brigade. This movie Hannah John-Kamen's playing Jill in is actually the second live-action Resident Evil piece that's been announced, where Wesker is still white - I see KiA2 has already noted he's played by Lance Riddick in the Netflix series - but it comes at the cost of Leon Kennedy becoming Indian (the New Delhi kind, not the Mohawk kind). IIRC both are also being produced by Constantin Film, the studio behind the original RE movies, which is already a discouraging sign even before all the racebending.
Yeah you're right, I just misread the original comment I was replying to & wanted to acknowledge it earlier but I see now that even after an hour, my edits still won't register on this site for some reason. Oh well.
For whatever it might be worth, this series is being produced by New Line Cinema (which produced the movie trilogy) rather than Amazon, and is being directed by an experienced Japanese director (Kenji Kamiyama, the Ghost in the Shell guy). Also the story they're adapting is that of the Rohirrim king Helm Hammerhand, whose tale starts off with him fat-shaming some jackass and punching the latter so hard he dies - not exactly something that can be made woke easily.
'To one of these councils Freca rode with many men, and he asked the hand of Helm's daughter for his son Wulf. But Helm said: "You have grown big since you were last here; but it is mostly fat, I guess"; and men laughed at that, for Freca was wide in the belt.
'Then Freca fell in a rage and reviled the king, and said this at the last: "Old kings that refuse a proffered staff may fall on their knees." Helm answered: "Come! The marriage of your son is a trifle. Let Helm and Freca deal with it later. Meanwhile the king and his council have matters of moment to consider."
When the council was over, Helm stood up and laid his great hand on Freca's shoulder, saying: "The king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside"; and he forced Freca to walk before him out from Edoras into the field. To Freca's men that came up he said: "Be off! We need no hearers. We are going to speak of a private matter alone. Go and talk to my men!" And they looked and saw that the king's men and his friends far outnumbered them, and they drew back.'
"Now, Dunlending," said the king, "you have only Helm to deal with, alone and unarmed. But you have said much already, and it is my turn to speak. Freca, your folly has grown with your belly. You talk of a staff! If Helm dislikes a crooked staff that is thrust on him, he breaks it. So!" With that he smote Freca such a blow with his fist that he fell back stunned, and died soon after. 'Helm then proclaimed Freca's son and near kin the king's enemies; and they fled, for at once Helm sent many men riding to the west marches.'
I thought ATLA was pretty good. But yeah, that's a list of one and I'll be very pleasantly surprised if this Helm Hammerhand series turns out OK.
The only slightly encouraging sign I've gotten out of this article is that it's being done by New Line (who produced the movie trilogy) rather than Amazon. It also seems they hired Kenji Kamiyama to direct it, but I can't say I'm 100% confident that's going to turn out great - LOTR is obviously a very different kettle of fish compared to Ghost in the Shell.
Way back in S6, Ian McShane (who had a remarkably forgettable role as a short-lived & nonsensically pantheistic septon) responded to some pissed off fans that hey, it's just tits and dragons, so why don't they just chill out & get a life? D&D are in that exact same headspace. They didn't take their own show seriously, never had any genuine passion for ASOIAF or fantasy in general (by their own admission they wanted to adapt it b/c of how shocking the Red Wedding was, and that's not even halfway into GoT...) and regularly displayed contempt toward the fantasy genre, the fans and even basic storytelling ('themes are for 8th grade book reports').
Yeah, small wonder that the jackasses who aggressively minimize or remove the fantasy elements to their fantasy show because they think the 'soccer moms' and 'NFL players' they're trying to expand their audience out to can't handle it, can't stick their landing either. (And for all that, Aaron Rodgers has made no secret of how much he hates the ending and how he wished the show had ended differently anyway) Just another sad story of the inevitable happening from handing a decent property off to talentless pieces of shit who look down on its unironic fans and whose ''''writing'''' process is 90% just them huffing their own farts, in a time when we have to deal with so many similar sad stories already.
Anyway, this has basically made GoT into probably the world's most expensive gatekeeping lesson to date. Anyone who thinks the fantasy genre is just 'tits and dragons' so you shouldn't think too deeply as you consoom shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it, if one's attitude is that awful going in I can already tell they won't have anything positive to contribute and whatever opinions they might have about the genre and works belonging to it hold no value, just as I can tell dogshit neither tastes good nor has any health benefit on sight. It'd be real nice if that shallow, disrespectful and frankly cancerous mentality burned right down with GoT itself so it won't be around to destroy the next generation of big-budget fantasy TV in another 30 years in the exact same way, because right now GoT's downfall seems to have rendered the 2020s fantasy boom I had thought would happen pretty much totally stillborn.
Likewise. As I've said in my other post, in the same amount of time that's passed since Martin's last book, JK Rowling completed a series of seven; also, this year will mark 25 years since A Game Of Thrones was first published.
For me, there's no question that GRRM has completely given up on ever finishing ASOIAF, probably even before the show concluded (since it had been declining steeply for years before finally completely burning down in S8). It's likely a mix of having seen the universally negative reaction to the show's ending (which = his ending, at least in broad strokes), the realization that he's written himself into a corner and has no easy way to extricate himself from the absolute crapton of half-baked POVs & sideplots he's got running as of AFFC/ADWD, and being a filthy rich dude in his 70s.
Man probably wants to just swim in his millions for as long as he can at this point. Which I can actually sympathize with somewhat, but even if the 'oh he doesn't owe the fans an ending' argument were to be granted, I'd argue he does at least owe his paying readers some basic honesty and should really just fess up to it instead of lying to them year after year about how he's totally working on the next book and it'll be out soon™.
Do you blame GRRM or D&D more for how the show ended?
Plenty of blame to go around, but I actually fault GRRM a bit more than D&D. The latter signed on to adapt his work, not create something original of their own, and pretty much nobody in 2011 foresaw Martin failing to release The Winds Of Winter all decade. (The most pessimistic estimates I had seen before GoT started airing was that it'd take him about 5 years, which was the gap between A Storm Of Swords & A Feast For Crows)
D&D could've tried to properly adapt AFFC and ADWD through more seasons, which we know they were obviously allergic to. But ultimately they had been able to do an at-minimum reasonable job adapting Martin's published material and although things went to shit once they started trying to implement their original ''''ideas'''', they were never supposed to do that in the first place & largely did so because GRRM failed to get the next book out quickly enough to guide them (or, indeed, in a remotely reasonable timeframe).
Personally I'm certain GRRM has given up on ever finishing the series, in part because the show's ending and his own are the same at least in broad strokes and he's horrified by how it was universally loathed, and is just lying about it every now & then to string the remaining fans along. He's certainly found the time & desire to work on just about everything except TWOW for the past 10 years, including a freaking GoT Broadway musical.
I also have to wonder if wokeness had anything to do with the decline of the show.
I also wonder if the reaction to Sansa getting raped had anything to do with the direction of the show.
Oh, no fucking question, IMO. The backlash by the Tumblr/Twitter woke brigades to Sansa being raped (which I also found to be a completely stupid & nonsensical plot development, but not just because it was a bad thing happening to a female character) absolutely seems to have frightened D&D into overcompensating. The show had had woke leanings before (mainly in Dany being made out to be a much more saintly character than her book counterpart), but it unquestionably firmly boarded the 'grrl powah' train and never looked back in S6.
Sansa was probably the single worst manifestation of said 'grrl powah'. From S6 onward D&D began to nonstop insist that she's this political genius now, to the extreme of having other characters shill for her supposed intelligence, despite a total lack of actual intelligent maneuvers onscreen. Basically everything she does and says cements her as a raging, edgy, treacherous snarky bitch - a combination of a stereotypical '80s high school drama 'queen bee' character & a know-nothing-know-it-all middle management type with vastly more ambition & ego than brains - but everyone else is dumbed down to make her look smart. Her character arc is a flat circle, as she ends the series a selfish cunt who actively backstabs her family for a chance at a crown just as she was in S1, but we're clearly expected to praise it as an empowering and well-earned conclusion to her story.
Arya was the worse Mary Sue when it comes to pulling off ridiculous feats, but I personally found Sansa to be even more unlikable as a character. Perhaps it's precisely because she actually has a little more character than Arya (who by S7-8 isn't even a character so much as she's a plot device for D&D), and all that character was repulsive but was still presented by D&D as cool, heroic and empowered. I'd actually like her better if she was played as a straight villain.
Within a month it will be literally a full decade since A Dance With Dragons came out, and The Winds of Winter is still nowhere in sight. To put how ridiculous this is in perspective, JK Rowling managed to finish the entirety of Harry Potter - seven books - in the same amount of time that it's taken GRRM to (supposedly) write ONE.
Yeah, this series is never going to finish. I doubt Martin's even written more than 50 pages for TWOW in the last 2 years since the show ended (he even said the fans could imprison him in a volcano if he didn't have it done by some convention last year IIRC, and obviously that's come & gone) and that's my most generous estimate.
Dude's done, he's been done since his intended ending got tested by a focus group of tens of millions courtesy of the show and was universally reviled, at this point he's just stringing his devastated and still-declining fanbase along with the occasional 'yeah I'm totally working on it guys!' crumb of false hope on his Not-A-Blog.
I have to doubt it was China that was behind this, or at least the #1 reason. Cover jettisoned their entire China branch rather than lose Coco and she seemed to finally be getting a handle on the anti spam recently, plus she's featured prominently in recent advertising for Hololive Alternative. Idk, it doesn't make sense to me that they'd cut her loose at this junction.
In any case, if this isn't an out-of-season April Fool's joke I hope Kaichou hangs on as a manager at Cover or some other back-office role. Maybe even the manager of Holo-EN's 2nd generation, because if I'm going to be optimistic for once I might as well go all the way.
In the case of Tolkien's work I think it'd be difficult to find a bigger piece of contemporary Western literary canon that's tied more closely to Christianity. Maybe Narnia, but AFAIK that isn't quite as big and influential as Lord of the Rings (and the rest of his works set in Arda) is. And it's definitely turned out to be a good thing!
To the everlasting credit of the Tolkien fandom, this has been known & accepted for decades. That Tolkien himself was a traditionalist Catholic who refused to use any language other than Latin at Mass and whose religious beliefs fundamentally informed his work (which he's straight up said to be the case in one of his letters) is pretty well-known. And although there have been increasing efforts by the woke mob to throw shade at him for this since the mid-2010s (they didn't seem very interested in LOTR at all before that), the aforementioned fandom didn't back down or accommodate the invaders - the collective response has been pretty uniformly 'if you don't like it then fuck off, you don't get to change anything when you aren't worthy of offering up your works as a toilet paper substitute to the master himself'.
It must've helped that 1) until last year, Tolkien's son Christopher was around and a zealous stickler for his father's vision and 2) Tolkien's literary universe being 'of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work' in his own words meant that it was bound to attract a certain core crowd with an inherently anti-woke predisposition. Sadly Christopher Tolkien is now dead, but so far the latter's strong negative reaction to TORN selling out & their consistently (as far as I've seen) negative reception of the tide of bad news about the Amazon series have been encouraging.
Fortunately it seems the wokeness is still mostly contained to just TheOneRing.net. Far from getting a bunch of 'Tolkien Fans Are Dead' articles in support, they're getting shat on over on YT (I just watched a JustSomeGuy vid about this, actually) and TheOneRing.com (a far superior site that's older, enjoys stronger official connections and was founded around the books rather than TORN which was founded around & got big from the movies - also, they did a readalong with the Babylon Bee) seems to be actively trying to challenge TORN on their own Twitter.
If you have mob justice and lynching, inevitably some people whom you lynch turn out to be guilty. There's a reason that is not acceptable.
Under normal circumstances, yes. In the event of a total breakdown of society or the capture of the state's organs of justice and law & order by factions which care not a whit for either except to use it as a bludgeon against their enemies however, I find it very difficult to not at least slightly sympathize with those who take law & order into their own hands. Better whatever bloody little slices of justice vigilantism can mete out than none at all, IMO.
I've never understood this argument. I have no idea if Leo Frank was guilty or not, but it's not as if people in the deep south were just assuming that every crime was committed by a black guy.
Can't find the article which laid the case against Frank out right now, all I remember is that it was on a website long tarred as 'antisemitic' and a nest of conspiracy theories by the mainstream (despite, as far as I can tell, hardly being Stormfronty). Unz, Urz or something like that - I recall it also had an Assange associate on board, which was what drew my interest to it in the first place way back in the day.
But I do remember one of its arguments as to why the Frank case was so exceptional was that 'raped and murdered white girls' was the #1 accusation for lynching, and that it obviously carried the most waving-red-flags-in-front-of-a-bull racial implications for white Southern society. There's no way the Deep South of the 1910s would have allowed a black guy they thought, even for a second, really did rape and murder a 13-year-old white girl go free, which would be tantamount to letting him pose a further threat to other little white girls as far as they'd be concerned.
Couple that with other arguments on how Frank was a wealthy & well-connected (particularly to the media and other Jewish business tycoons) businessman with no known enemies in Georgia who was capable of affording, or even being practically gifted, top-end lawyers while the aforementioned black guy was literally a dirt-poor janitor, as well as how the trial & appeals process were quite exhaustive and dragged on for years (as opposed to being the extremely quick & unfair affairs as you might expect of an actual 'we just really want this guy dead/free because he's not white/white' case), and well. You can see why the ADL's interpretation of the case & lynching, which have been the popular view for a century, makes less and less sense the more you examine it.
Depends on who 'they' are. Basically, they tended to lynch people whom they presumed guilty, based on good evidence or faulty. Also, in the Reconstruction era, people who dared to vote Republican - black or white.
We don't need to go overboard.
Yeah, fair enough. Sometimes I forget the need to take a break from this enraging shit & go do something else to wind myself down.
That is the narrative that's been pushed for a century and the one I believed until a few years ago. But there's reason to think at least some of the people who were lynched (whether by the Klan or, more regularly, just random mobs) were criminals who absolutely had their horrific deaths coming, like Jesse Washington (who even the NAACP investigator of his lynching concluded actually murdered the white woman whose death caused his) and Leo Frank (the guy the ADL was founded to defend, who together with the best lawyers money could buy desperately tried to blame his rape & murder of a white girl on a black guy, but couldn't get even the 1910s Deep South to buy his story).
And I do have to wonder: if the popular narrative around the Klan and the lynch mobs is wrong on that count, that they weren't just going around killing random black people for fun but on at least several high-profile occasions lynched actual criminals who have since been lionized and (heh) whitewashed by the media and academia, what else is said narrative wrong about?
Rather old, it's from last summer. But yes, the first time I saw this incident marked another addition to my list of reasons as to why the KKK may have been on to something with that whole 'you need to lynch a few joggers from time to time to set an example for the rest' idea of theirs, the most recent addition to which was that horrible kidnapping & murder of a 4-year-old last week. I have not a damn clue as to how anyone expects the American and, more generally, Western social fabric to hold for much longer as shit like this inevitably piles up over the coming years.
I meant the ending to this whole saga was an anticlimax, especially after all the big bold shit the Black Hammer guys were spewing from their upper assholes. No glorious gunbattle with the feds or the much-rumored right-wing death squads, no determination to hang in there until winter sets in and people start dropping dead from exposure & starvation, no CHAZ-esque wild cycle of coups and arsons and murders of innocent 'people of color' - just, the cops asked them to leave and they did, apparently without even a small tantrum ('left the area without incident'). Laaame.
Heh! Well as the Romans (or, I suppose, the Byzantines & Trapezuntines in Vlad's day) would say, it ain't gay when you're the one doing the impaling.
Since the roving right-wing death squads are still nowhere in sight - I'm instead really hoping the backlash to these proglodytes builds and builds and builds until it finally fucking overflows, and starts electing candidates whose understanding of 'law and order' came right from the Vlad Tepes school of how to deal with criminal trash. Realistically that's what it's gonna take to fix places like Minneapolis and Portland, anyway.
Well then! That does provide a more plausible reason for Conway spouting this shit, maybe he just wants to try to eliminate the competition. At least I hope so, that makes way more sense than him having actually become a woke puritan - in that regard, as the article itself points out, he's a man pointing out the specks in other people's eyes while forgetting the 2,000-year-old pine log jammed in his own.
Smart of them.
Oh it definitely came from within in Rome's case, too. Opportunistic, backstabbing senators focused solely on short-term personal gain & the descendants of barbarians allowed to reach high up into the top ranks of Roman society killed every single remotely effective leader who tried to turn things around for Rome. Such was the fate of great men whose greatness was cut short like Stilicho (incidentally a half-barbarian himself), Flavius Aetius and Majorian.
If it weren't for the absolute worthlessness of the Roman political class and the complacency of its citizens, grown so soft and hollow-spirited that they'd rather keep their heads down & go along with the flow than try to resist their new barbarian overlords, Rome could have endured for another thousand years. As it did in the more energetic and less degenerated East, which had the good sense to purge the problems it shared with the West before it was toppled.