Sorry, I can't hear all this whining over the sound of all that money manga's raking in - pretty sure they've been (absolutely justly) outselling Western comics by 10 or more times for years.
The Chicoms had a habit of letting the Nationalists do all the heavy lifting (and take the brunt of casualties) while they ate paste and mostly just stayed underground. The notion that the Communists were actually not just helpful in the war against Japan, but even did more fighting and fought more competently than the Nationalists, is pure Maoist revisionism with zero grounding in reality.
Hell, those assholes ended up fighting non-Communist-aligned guerrillas behind Japanese lines as much as or more than they did the Japanese themselves. He Long's campaign to eradicate all such resistance militias in Hebei which wouldn't recognize CCP leadership in the late 1930s is just one example of this perfidy. And Mao himself had the nerve to thank Japan for invading decades later, because Japanese aggression got Chiang's generals to backstab & coerce him into an alliance with the Reds when he had them on the ropes and then weakened the ROC to a point where they could take over fairly easily!
Ah, well, in that case I'd have thought the feds already crossed that line with Ruby Ridge long before Ashli Babbitt. The Weavers objectively did way less than the '''''protesters'''' of the 1960s and still managed to get a fed death squad sent their way, after all.
fired on students
Alright, the rest is bad, not disputing that. But considering how frequently those students were Communist or Communist-friendly and degenerate rioters, who included such luminaries as the Weathermen and the guys who got Ethnic Studies (IOW, shit like Afrocentrism) established institutionally, and in general were among those most responsible for the current woke state of affairs. And nobody talks about how the day before Kent State, the most infamous shooting of students by US troops, left-wing radicals burned down the ROTC building on campus.
Sure looks to me like the only problem was that the National Guard and cops didn't kill nearly enough of the verminous brats. Perhaps if they had - if monsters like Bill Ayers, Susan Rosenberg and Bernardine Dohrn had been taken for a one-way helicopter trip instead of being allowed to not only live but infect society even further - America wouldn't be having the problems it does now.
Well! As you might guess, I must respectfully disagree with your that assessment. I think Martin is actually not a bad character-writer, but his worldbuilding is actually quite shoddy if you look beneath the surface. If I were to explain in detail why (and why it certainly pales before Tolkien's) I'd be here all night. So instead I will try to summarize the most egregious flaws in bullet-point form:
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Martin can't seem to make up his mind on what his armies look like and how they operate. You have Septon Meribald's story about how he & so many other soldiers were dirt-poor draftee/volunteer schlubs fighting with kitchen knives & farming implements, but the armies we actually see duking it out are capable of standing their ground in the face of massed cavalry charges and executing complex maneuvers (ex. the Battle of the Green Fork near the end of AGOT). Historically drafting peasants was an absolute last resort and most battles were fought between armies of knights, men-at-arms & mercenaries, because nobody in their right mind wants soldiers who can't fight and who you need to work your fields anyway. GoT armies act like the larger and more professional armies of the 16th century onward, up to & including tearing apart the countryside and terrorizing peasants in their way to 'forage' for supplies.
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Martin's armies are in general far too big for such a 'realistic' medieval setting, even a late medieval one. Take the aforementioned Battle of the Whispering Wood: the Lannisters have got 20,000 men (including 7,500 cavalry!) while the Starks are fielding 17,000. The Tyrells and Renly field a host of 100,000. In reality medieval European armies were quite a bit smaller, being comprised (as said before) largely or entirely of knights and their men-at-arms who were typically only obligated to serve for 40 days; after that their lord would have to start paying them, which almost nobody could do because outside of the Byzantine Empire, most feudal realms collected taxes in kind rather than in gold & silver. Also, medieval logistics could not support such large armies for long. Tolkien comparison: the good guys have almost 15,000 men between them (8,000 Gondorians & 6,000 Rohirrim) at the Pelennor Fields, the climactic battle of ROTK.
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The Ironborn make no sense as a culture. They're reavers who have terrorized the mainland for millennia...despite hailing from a bunch of islands consistently described as barren rocks with little in the way of vegetation or arable land. Unlike the RL Vikings they're ostensibly based on, they actually HATE trading and aggressively look down on any of their kind who pay the 'gold price' (trading abroad) instead of the 'iron price' (raiding for shit). So where do they keep finding wood to rebuild their navy, which has been not only defeated but completely crushed on several occasions in history? For that matter, why haven't the continental powers who dwarf them completely crushed them for being nuisances and settled the Iron Isles themselves, despite said isles being conquered by mainlanders from time to time? How did they manage to conquer and hold the Riverlands, a much bigger and more heavily populated kingdom than their own, for centuries despite a long history of hostility & stark differences in culture & religion between the two? Tolkien comparison: the Corsairs of Umbar are a pretty advanced civilization descended from the Black Numenoreans and didn't spend all their time being annoying pirates.
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The Dothraki make even less sense. They're clearly based on the Eurasian nomad hordes, but don't wear armor, don't have bows for their iconic weapon, have no fixed settlements at all besides Vaes Dothrak, and disdain settled civilization utterly. Their usual tactic is to just frontally charge at their enemies over and over until one side breaks, most hilariously attempting this against an Unsullied pike phalanx 18 times in the historical battle which made the latter famous. They should not realistically pose any threat to any non-Stone Age opponent, unlike the real Eurasian hordes which were often comparable to or even more advanced than the settled civilizations they battled and whose political practices could even make their rule more attractive than the kings they displaced (ex. the Huns and Mongols). Tolkien comparison: the Easterlings, and particularly the Wainriders, were noted to be extremely dangerous opponents to Gondor thanks not just to their barbaric ferocity but also to their excellent arms & armor and innovative tactics (involving horse archers & chariots).
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The Faith of the Seven, the main church of Westeros, has comically little power for a 'realistic' medieval church. The Westerosi have religion but they don't actually believe in it, much like post-modern people these days tend to. Meanwhile actual Medieval kings were highly faithful and served a role in worship. They built edifices to the church and things like a King being unfaithful to his wife were huge problems that could topple a kingdom. If you were excommunicated, the people believed that working with you meant they would be going to hell with you later, and they believed it; just look at Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, whose excommunication left him kneeling in the snow & begging the Pope for forgiveness for three days because literally none of his lords and servants would lift a finger for him. Tolkien comparison: the Free Peoples don't have organized religion but they do have a fairly pervasive sense of spirituality, and good reason for it (the last time they had a temple & organized clergy, both were puppets of Sauron) unlike ASOIAF, where the Faith inexplicably never tried to regain its power in the nearly 200 years after the Targaryens lost their dragons until the High Sparrow arises in AFFC.
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Lack of cultural variation among the Andal Westerosi kingdoms. There's no way 5 out of the 7 kingdoms, which comprise the majority of the continent's kingdoms and population, should be basically interchangeable and all speak the exact same language, even despite their shared Andal ancestry and worship of the Seven. The Roman Empire had more regional variety than that, to say nothing of just medieval Western Europe or the HRE alone - without touching the Balkans or Eastern Europe. Tolkien comparison: the Gondorians had regional and cultural differences between themselves, with a Sindarin-speaking Numenorean elite lording it over the Middle Man majority (which only grew as the blood of Numenor waned) and Westron developing later as a mutually intelligible universal lingua franca from the former's original Adunaic language, but even that wasn't without its well-developed regional dialects such as Hobbitish.
I could go on but I'm already halfway to the .win character limit. To sum it up, Tolkien's worldbuilding isn't flawless - I don't think anyone's is, and there's always room for improvement - but it is insanely ahead of and certainly far more consistent than Martin's, which (as I have basically said before) isn't so much the realistic medieval world it's been advertised as, as it is a post-modern progressive undergrad's understanding of medieval Europe through pop-culture-tinted lens. ASOIAF isn't without its good points, but I would definitely not count the worldbuilding among those points, and instead argue it's one of the weaker parts of the work instead.
Quite a few passages from LOTR stand out to me, but one that holds a special place in my heart is this one from ROTK, when a completely exhausted Sam lies down amid the lifeless rocks and ash of Mordor. He's totally beat, pretty much on the verge of collapse, and then...
The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.
I can't think of anything Martin or Pullman have written that struck me like those sentences did. Truly it's no wonder crass, cynical materialists and second-rate authors like GRRM and Pullman resent this dude so much and hope to take his place in readers' hearts; they can't make anything quite like what he made, because even this single passage impresses upon us the existence of immaterial things worth fighting for - indeed of greater worth than anything in our fleeting material world - while such things are antithetical to their worldview, and does so with greater grace than both of them combined could hope to have.
Oh, but I can go a level deeper than even that. Who is the lord of Mordor? Sauron. What are Sauron and his boss Morgoth best known for? Besides being archetypical fantasy dark lords, they originally created orcs by mangling and twisting captive elves, tearing every bit of goodness from them until all that's left is ugly cruelty, seething hatred and a total lack of belief in any higher power but the master who rules them. Sauron did this and wages war on the Free Peoples of Middle-earth in the name of imposing rationality and order, Morgoth did it because he's just a destructive spiteful asshat.
And now we have Martin, who thinks he can beat out Tolkien by writing medieval fantasy based on LOTR but 'darker and edgier', meaning hollow, cynical and full of pretenses of being 'realistic' when it's actually uglier than our real Middle Ages; and Pullman, who seeks to attack C. S. Lewis' books about kids having adventures against a fantastic backdrop full of religious allegories by making a fantasy work of his own where God is both evil & impotent, rationality and freedom (as defined by a modern antitheist progressive) are the things to aspire to past the controlling oppression of the church, and the at-best barely pubescent male & female leads are implied to have sex at the end.
Yeah, can't imagine why those two might get assblasted at any comparisons to Sauron, or more generally when their works are compared to the ones they totally didn't rip off & try to 'deconstruct'!
Fair. I would have thought the same myself, had the show not gone out of its way to either change the circumstances around Dany's atrocities so that she's the one in the right (to be fair this isn't exclusive to her, Tyrion has a pivotal scene changed from him murdering someone in a fit of rage to killing them in self-defense for example) or to outright delete those atrocities. If the intention was to portray her as the villain all along, they've got to give her actual villainous stuff to do instead of just the occasional ominous remark & chords; the latter is just poor storytelling (or in other words 'show, don't tell').
That organic buildup over five books is why I can believe Book Dany would turn out to be a psychotic warlord in the end, but why Show Dany's turn weirded even me out despite my not liking the character or the show by then: she's just overall far more arrogant, ruthless and entitled in the books, and does a lot more that makes her less likable. The way she was set up on the show, however, left me with the impression that D&D were trying to make her into an unironic progressive messiah until the very end - and when that end came, how the heel turn was done was 'subverting expectations' bullshit that was also a total anticlimax for the character's arc until that point, as was the case with pretty much every other major and middling character on the show.
Yes, I'm aware. The Black Dinner was a very small-scale affair that didn't involve an entire army being slaughtered, just two young dukes who the king (being a 10 year old boy at the time) couldn't save - and that dishonor was paid back when many years later, the same now-all-grown-up king personally murdered the son of the greatest magnate who planned it, throwing Scotland into several more decades of unrest.
The Massacre of Glencoe took place centuries after the end of the Middle Ages, when honor had lost its role in politics entirely. The guys who carried it out did so at the command of a Parliament which had just blatantly committed treason by overthrowing their king for another, and then rewrote history to make themselves the unambiguous good guys.
Anyway, my point wasn't that real medieval history was spotless - of course treachery and murder happened - but that it was, relatively speaking, less insanely bloody & backstabby than Westeros' history is made out to be. Even the Byzantines, whose court intrigues have preserved their name as a byword for 'complex and treacherous', would normally balk at pulling a Red Wedding-level affair because it'd destroy their good name; when they actually did (abandoning Emperor Romanos IV at Manzikert, 1071 and the 1182 Massacre of the Latins) it screwed them over massively and greatly hastened the collapse of their empire. Honor was a serious concept in medieval Europe, not the polite suggestion and/or cynical joke of a fairytale that it's treated as in ASOIAF, and regicides were notable precisely because they were actually quite rare; extremely, pointlessly brutal goons like Gregor Clegane, slimeballs like the Freys and the higher lords who enabled them like Tywin typically had short lifespans because of all the enemies they'd make.
I will grant Martin this, though: he does at least try to present some consequences for the Freys & Lannisters post-Red Wedding, even if they were far lighter than what would realistically happen IRL, unlike the show which just wholeheartedly embraces nihilism and doesn't punish anyone for committing atrocities until & unless the plot demands it, ex. Ramsay. By the end there what little message D&D still had basically boiled down to 'believe in nothing and nobody but yourself, betray and murder everyone around you to get ahead, break promises as soon as you make them, always prioritize your own petty squabbles & focus on short-term gratification over long-term thinking - and everything will work out for you'. Which is all well & good if you're a current-year corporate shark but a horrible way to manage a remotely 'realistic' medieval kingdom, to tie this tangent back to what I was saying about how those functioned IRL earlier.
If only. Time Magazine called him that originally, but it seems the success got to his head real fast and he's been thinking he can surpass Tolkien for the last few decades. Even setting aside his infamous 'what's Aragorn's tax policy' and 'the way Gandalf came back from the dead was dumb' criticisms, his Wiki article has noted that:
Martin has been described as "the American Tolkien" by literary critics.[81] While Martin finds inspiration in Tolkien's legacy,[82] he aims to go beyond what he sees as Tolkien's "medieval philosophy" of "if the king was a good man, the land would prosper" to delve into the complexities, ambiguities, and vagaries of real-life power: "We look at real history and it's not that simple ... Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king."[83] Per this fact Martin has been credited with the rise of grimdark fantasy, a modern form of an "anti-Tolkien" approach to fantasy writing which,[84] according to British science fiction and fantasy novelist Adam Roberts, is characterized by its reaction to Tolkien's idealism even though it owes a lot to Tolkien's work.[85][86]
Emphasis mine.
Incidentally, if you were to actually study medieval history in-depth you'd find that ASOIAF isn't particularly realistic - grimdark, or frankly grimderp, is a much better descriptor for it. Having an honorable king who could trust and be trusted by his vassals was actually important in medieval society, for starters, since the functioning of feudal politics depended pretty much entirely on your personal likability & trustworthiness in an age before modern large-scale professional bureaucracies; someone like Walder Frey or Tywin Lannister would've been outlawed by their king and/or had their lands raided to shit by and all their serfs defect to their neighbors for their crimes. And that's before we get into the obscenely unrealistic and inconsistent army sizes & composition, how scholarship is the preserve of the secular Maester order and not the Faith of the Seven, etc.
Tl;dr ASOIAF isn't so much a 'realistic' depiction of medieval politics and society transposed to a fantasy Europeanesque setting as it is basically a modern liberal's pop-cultural understanding of the Middle Ages, and Martin should really stop flattering himself.
The former, thanks for catching that.
I tjhink GoT's last season has already badly, if not fatally, injured that boom of fantasy TV shows I thought was imminent close to the end of the last decade. Everything new I hear about Amazon's LOTR further decreases my interest in that show. HOTD itself I'm 90% sure is dead on arrival, D&D managed to kill the franchise so hard that it went from being one of the biggest pop-cultural phenomena of the 2010s to deader-than-wights practicallt overnight and virtually nobody rewatched, memed about or just discussed it all last year just after it ended.
My guess is that they invested too much & saw themselves in Dany, whose show version was an unironic 'enlightened white progressive female savior of the world's oppressed' type until literally the second-to-last episode. A lot of her shadier actions and blatant atrocities, like having a little girl tortured to compel a confession from her (almost certainly innocent) parents in Book 5, are downplayed or simply don't happen at all on the show, so her progression to Girl Hitler felt way less organic and more 'unfair' on-screen.
Martin is an executive producer on this show and the other GoT spinoffs, so he absolutely could have put his foot down over the wokecasting and didn't. He's clearly gone senile if he thinks that'll make House of the Dragon attractive to the woke crowd anyway (and he's gonna need them to compensate after further antagonizing the actual fans of his books), they still hate him after last year's Hugo awards to the point that some dangerhair cunt who wrote a piece on him literally titled 'George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun' is already a Hugo finalist this year.
Ah well, if he hasn't learned anything from such ingratitude after he took a nice big diarrheic shit over the Sad Puppies, he's clearly not going to learn a thing now. He already has his 'fuck you' pile of money, after all. And will still be able to cry into it every day after HOTD inevitably flames out and the aforementioned dangerhair disses him some more in her Hugo acceptance speech.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, Daenaerys fully devolved into a psychopathic tyrant (in a manner much more rushed & less organic than the buildup to that in the books, which will never be finished...) and was killed for it, but the show's other feminist superwhamen got off just fine.
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Sansa, the queen bitch whose idea of being a good leader includes talking down to the (male) help and her uncle (who's sacrificed everything & became a Lannister prisoner for their family) on the regular, betraying Jon's secret immediately and antagonizing Dany the dragon-rider who has obliterated entire armies on the occasion that she and her dragons actually participate: becomes Queen of the North with no apparent repercussions and despite having done nothing to deserve that crown.
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Arya, the show's most obvious female Mary Sue to such an extreme that even the defenders of the later seasons have conceded there's no defending the bullshit she gets up to before whacking the Night King, like that time she swam in an open sewer after being gut-stabbed half a dozen times and was just peachy: lives to the end and sails into the sunset, at peace with her family after not having to choose between them or her revenge at all (unlike what has been foreshadowed in the books).
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Brienne, who the show turned into a totally un-feminine brutish thug shorn of all the kindness & self-doubts she had in the books and allowed to also get her revenge on Stannis without any moral conflict or consequence: lives to the end, becomes a Kingsguard and writes positively about Jaime in the White Book despite his own complete betrayal of his eight-season character arc.
And so on. Other than Dany, I think the only major female characters to get screwed over were Ellaria and the Sand Snakes, and that was because they had become way too hated by the audience for even D&D and the late-season GoT writing staff to get away with giving them anything resembling a happy ending.
HAHAHA they made Corlys Velaryon black! The Velaryons, for those who haven't read the books or looked into the worldbuilding material GRRM has released to date, are a Valyrian family like their inbred overlords the Targaryens; noted for having the same pale skin, silver hair and purple or bluish-purple eyes of that race. It is precisely because of their shared Valyrian ancestry that the Targaryen royals typically married a Velaryon (by now their cousins many times over) when they aren't bedding their own sisters, because as the incest demonstrates, they were a bunch extremely concerned with the purity of their bloodlines - it's also why they only rarely married their heirs to the subject Great Houses of the setting. This particular Velaryon and his family have been consistently depicted with those Valyrian looks in all art and fanart up to this point.
The Velaryon looks are quite seriously a major story element in the Dance of the Dragons (the civil war which this series revolves around), because the crown princess Rhaenyra's first three kids look nothing like her Velaryon husband (who is gay) and a whole lot like her non-Valyrian lover. Their disputed paternity is what opens the way for her half-brother (already legally the heir, but bypassed by a sanction from their father) to challenge her claim to the throne. But I guess storytelling integrity is no match for the power of Current Year diversity, eh?
Fuck you GRRM, not only are you never going to finish your main series, but now you're selling out what little artistic integrity you still have to the woke crowd even though D&D have already crashed the TV side of your franchise with no survivors and so, if anything, only the most hardcore fans of those books you're never gonna complete are going to care to watch this series. Can't believe this guy ever entertained the title of 'American Tolkien'.
Hey that's pretty good. These NoJack guys certainly blow CHAZ security out of the water.
God, I really despise this woman. I'm drawing a blank on anyone who can better encapsulate middling bougie woke female Youtubers than Ellis - even setting aside the infamous abortion debacle she's a backstabbing (alternately shitting & trying to forget the Nostalgia Critic, who made her career back when Channel Awesome was of any relevance, and her own family which she denounces as 'white trash' for being from Tennessee even though they paid for her way through film school), classist, obnoxious and ridiculously stuck-up utter phony.
It takes a truly special sort to make fucking Movieblob look better than yourself, but I think this bitch has managed it with her incredible non-apology for (rightly!) shitting on his stalkerish tendencies. She's made it clear that she's only upset it gave the Internet Nahtzees a moment of entertainment, not that she embarrassed him for being an embarrassing trainwreck of a human being. If the Blob had even the beginnings of an actual spine, he'd have taken a break from wanting rural Americans exterminated to go after someone who actually deserves his brand of apoplectic-yet-utterly-impotent rage and told Ellis to shove her '''''apology''''' firmly up her ass.
I'll give her this much, though: she damn well knew her audience and how to press all the right buttons with them. Hell she's still got almost 10,000 subs on her Patreon as of today. This incident over Raya and the Last Dragon has shown she can be made to bleed and that it's a matter of time before she experiences a real downfall at the jaws of the piranha pack she's been feeding for years, but sadly I don't think she's been properly canceled just yet.
This was indeed one of Davis-Secord's main arguments.
The term “Anglo-Saxon” was rarely used at the time in England. They did not see themselves as a unified race, and actually were a motley collection of different peoples competing with each other. The kingdoms shared a language now known as Old English, but they spoke different dialects, warred with each other and sometimes allied with native forces to get an edge over each other.
The “Anglo-Saxon” label first appeared shortly before 800 CE in continental Latin works as a way to distinguish the English speakers in England from the distant relatives they had left in what are now Germany and Denmark. The label had not yet developed its overtly racist connotations at this point, but it nonetheless distinguished peoples in a way that built into modern racism. The majority of the term’s appearances in early documents within England itself occurred again in Latin texts, where it indicated expanded royal control over the previously separate kingdoms of the Angles, the Saxons and several other segments of the island’s population. Specifically, King Aethelstan (d. 939 CE) was described in charters at the end of his life as “emperor of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians, governor of the pagans and defender of the Britons.” Those Angles and Saxons — and their kingdoms — were distinct, and the other kingdoms of English speakers (not to mention Wales, Scotland or Danish settlements) were certainly left out of the term’s coverage.
This is as ridiculous an argument as saying that, because Alfonso VII titled himself 'Emperor of all Spain' but maintained Castile, Leon and Galicia as three separate kingdoms in personal union under him, there were no Spanish people in 1150. Actually even worse, England was a single unitary kingdom after Athelstan and never partitioned between his successors unlike Alfonso's Spain from two centuries later.
(Also, in that passage 'Northumbrians' referred to the Anglo-Danes of northern England, where Viking influence had been strongest and the longest-lasting Viking kingdom in England was located. Ethnic divisions between Angles, Jutes and Saxons had already effectively ceased to exist several centuries before Athelstan, hence why - as the article admits - he literally called himself emperor of the Anglo-Saxons and not emperor of the Angles and Saxons)
They're waiting for the useful idiots to deconstruct and damage society to the point where no recovery of any kind is possible before making their move, then getting rid of them. Although, they are willing to kill degenerates before that happens if the latter become too annoying.
It's indeed a huge, and hugely wrong, cope. That the Anglo-Saxons were divided into several kingdoms until the Viking invasions forced them to come together under Wessex or die doesn't mean there was no Anglo-Saxon identity (as much as any ethnic identity could exist in a time long before nation-states anyway), any more than Italy being disunified between the Lombard conquest of the peninsula in the late 6th century and the Risorgimento in the 19th meant there was no such thing as an Italian in those 1300 years or that there were no Spanish people between 711 and 1492 because Castile, Leon, Galicia and Aragon all existed as separate kingdoms throughout most of the Middle Ages. And that argument doesn't even work because England had been a singular, unified political entity for about a century & a half before the Normans ran it over.
The English kingdoms didn't speak different Angle and Saxon and Jutish languages, they just spoke different dialects of the same language (Englisc, or Old English). Their adherence to Roman Catholicism set them apart from the pagan Vikings and, to a lesser extent, the distinct Celtic Christianity of the Britons/Welsh. An Englishman from Wessex would most definitely not consider himself interchangeable with a Welshman from across Offa's Dyke, and a Northumbrian would find that West Saxon more familiar than he would a Pict from past the ruins of the Antonine Wall.
Even the political organization of Saxon England was different from those of the continent until the Normans rolled in and imposed what we would recognize as feudalism (the 'Norman Yoke', if you will) on the locals, which included things like eliminating allodial (inherently private) property - now all land in the kingdom belonged to the Norman king and you were only just renting it - unlike the situation under the English and Danish kings. (No shit an Enlightenment era liberal like Jefferson, who liked the ideal of yeomen farmers owning & running small farms, would prefer to identify with the Saxons than the centralizing and more directly oppressive Norman ruling class)
Finally the argument that Anglo-Saxons aren't Anglo-Saxons because they weren't the first people in Britain is stupid enough that I don't even need to address it. Suffice to say that if that's the case, then there are no Europeans outside the Basques and Georgians because everyone else's Indo-European ancestors were native only to the Ukrainian and Southern Russian steppe; no non-Bedouin Arabs from Hejaz and the Najd are actually Arabs; the only true Africans outside of West Africa are pygmies and the Khoisan, and so on. Literally every-fucking-body outside of these very few groups exclusive to a few regions with terrain that ranges from 'highly defensible to 'inhospitable' aren't autochtonous, they've conquered and been conquered by somebody else at some point in history. That obviously has no bearing on whether the non-autochtons are distinct ethnic groups themselves.
Tl;dr this Jonathan Davis-Secord is wrong and the America First caucus' organizers should've had the stones to commit to their plan regardless of how much the media screeches about how evil & racist they are, because the presstitutes are going to do that anyway regardless of what they do or don't do.
I didn't think this imbecile could say anything stupider than that, but here we are. How on earth does Krugman still have anyone who listens to him & cares for his opinion in the slightest? You'd already be better off getting economic opinions from the Weimar money printers and political ones from Jacob Schiff.
I think Cover/Hololive, at least, is very adamant about the 'do not discuss politics, religion or other sensitive topics under any circumstances' rule, since they correctly recognize that tons of people (weebs or not) absolutely crave apolitical entertainment in these times and to politicize Vtubing would mean chasing away tons of fans. Kiara might be a SJW in her private life, but from what I've seen she's never brought politics into Vtubing (whether of her own volition or because Cover Corp. is keeping her on a tight leash).
Of course there are some indie Vtubers, or at least V-Tweeters, out there who do get all political. But I would hope that their total lack of success, coupled with Hololive's own booming popularity and especially the popularity of the more based girls (Gura's got the highest # of subscribers out of all Hololive, while Kiara's channel remains in the dust with below 1 million subscribers still), sends the message across to Cover. Their leadership seems to have grown a spine after the Taiwan mess (shutting down Hololive CN and bailing on the mainland altogether rather than getting rid of Coco Kiryu & Akai Haato after apologies proved insufficient), so here's hoping that holds in the future.
Yes - on the actual Romanian people, I've seen a fair bit of racism from oh-so-enlightened Western Europeans toward them and other Eastern Europeans as well. Usually it's more condescending and less visceral than the hatred they have for gypsies, more in the 'ugh why can't you pick up our superior values & drop your old ethnic grudges and superstitions now that you've come here to steal our jobs' vein than the 'please report to your nearest death camp with your entire extended family' one, but I've seen it get there a lot more often recently.
But as I said, the hatred these supposedly supremely enlightened and tolerant Euro progressives have for gypsies is hilarious and deeply ironic, given how often they love to talk down to Americans (and to a lesser extent Canadians) about their racial issues. I'm aware the gypsies have severe cultural problems, as bad or worse than ghetto blacks and anyone unfortunate enough to fall under their influence across the ocean; but although you can't say anything negative about the latter, apparently European leftists have very few problems - and few to no penalties for - suggesting the former should be subjected to Stalinesque reeducation at best or exterminated as pests at worst on public fora.
I'm never going to forget this one moment in time, back in 2011 or so, when some American liberal on a board I used to frequent pulled their smug 'ew how racist' routine on a thread about some gypsies getting beaten up for being a nuisance in Austria (IIRC). Immediately 20+ European progressives and further-leftists, including an Irish tankie, dogpiled his dumb ass and unironically gave like 50 reasons as to why the gypsies had it coming and he shouldn't talk about shit he doesn't understand & has no experience with, nevermind that they had been doing that with everything the US did since ~2005 when they first joined the forum. Some of the funniest shit I've ever seen anywhere on the Internet.
Any European blathering about how racist America is should be asked point-blank what they think about the Romani. On every forum I've frequented that allowed political discussion I've seen the most socialistic, pro-open-borders, bleeding-heart watermelons from Western Europe suddenly turn into mini-Eichmanns at the mere mention of gypsies and start howling about how the only enlightenment they deserve is the light let into their skulls by the truncheons of the same cops they'd bash (and if French, riot against) every day.
Love this dude (not just in the 'oh he's based' sense, but as an actual historian) ever since I first saw him in a documentary about the Princes in the Tower ages ago, which was what got me to start looking into his books. I remember he also put Laurie Penny in her place around the same time that GG kicked off.
Well hot damn. Anita also supporting Palestine, Israel bombing journo hives (starting with that Arab Spring propaganda machine, Al Jazeera) and now this - the reasons to go Team Israel just keep piling up.