I agree on all counts except the third. The French built the Maginot Line specifically to force the Germans to go through Belgium, which was where they intended to fight the German army (thereby ensuring that French soil wouldn't be devastated like it was in WW1) under their strategy, the Dyle Plan (so named after the Dyle River in Belgium). What went wrong was that the Germans punched through the Ardennes forest, which the Allies had mistakenly concluded would be impassable for their panzers and thus left in the hands of their weakest formations to defend. The best units of the French Army were thus left trapped in the Low Countries with only scattered second-rate forces (and no real strategic reserve, since said reserve was committed to fight in Belgium already) left in the way of the German vanguard in France itself, hence, their total defeat shortly afterward.

The French strategy & generals were retarded, but not as retarded as they were in WW1, and to their credit the Dyle Plan was a little more sensible than its equivalent at the start of the latter conflict, Plan XVII.

From all that I've studied of history, it seems undeniable that cultivating a strong business class & commercial traditions definitely goes a long way to making a country strong. It's how the Italian & Dutch maritime powers were able to punch way above their weight for centuries (Venice vs. the Byzantines and the early Netherlands vs. Spain + Portugal, respectively). America, of course, was not only at its strongest but also most prosperous - for everyone, not just the uppermost crust of society - when the middle class was thriving. And China was approaching an early industrial revolution under its most innovative and merchant-friendly dynasty, the Song, who had set up what we might recognize as a proto-capitalist system with the world's first paper money, joint-stock companies, etc.

It's difficult to imagine a world where the Song got to continue on that trajectory instead of being crippled by the Jurchens & then obliterated by the Mongols. It would, at minimum, certainly have been a world where China consistently remains the top world power. As it was, instead China historically got centuries of stagnation under the neo-Confucian Ming and then oppression & ridiculous amounts of corruption (even by Chinese imperial standards) under the Qing. The same is true of Korea (more neo-Confucian stagnation) and Japan (stagnation under the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate, ultimately broken by Matthew Perry after said stagnation left them in the West's dust technologically).

That's actually a major facet of the Confucian class system, which sprang up in China but was adopted across the rest of East Asia as Chinese influence took root many centuries ago. Since merchants were indeed seen as producing nothing by their own hand, but instead move around the goods produced by others, they were ranked lowest in this system, beneath both farmers and craftsmen. (In China the top class were the scholars, thought to be the wisest on account of having to pass the imperial examination; in Japan it was the 'kuge', civil nobility, until they were overthrown & marginalized alongside the imperial family itself by the samurai toward the end of the Heian Period.)

Meh, if it sounds interesting, I'll pirate it. And if it turns out to actually be passable, it doesn't stress my conscience to say so. I don't doubt Netflix pays people to shill for them, but I highly doubt such shills would bother with KiA2.win, if only because not nearly enough people come here to make the effort worthwhile.

Just finished watching this myself, gave it a chance on the recommendation of friends who are much bigger weebs than myself swearing up & down that it broke the curse of anime/manga live-action adaptations. Well, it was at least sufficiently watchable that I made it through all eight episodes without feeling like puking my guts out and scooping my eyes out with a teaspoon, which is indeed an incredible feat by the standards of anime/manga adaptations made by Westerners in general and Netflix in particular. The bar it needed to clear was so low, it was chilling in Satan's boiler room. The sets looked good and though some of the stuff from the manga/anime was still too goofy to effectively translate into live-action, I could at least see that they made an effort with their $16 million or so per episode budget, unlike say Bebop or ROP.

Definitely noticed some woke casting & revisions of the source material, most glaringly the racebending of Nami's sister; Koby being portrayed by a pooner; and an interracial kiss between Usopp and Kaya (they're implied to be love interests in the manga/anime, but never get to the point of kissing). But in that regard it was much less frequent & in-my-face than I expected, so I guess Oda was mostly able to contain the script changes demanded by Netflix to minor side characters. He was also adamantly against shoehorning in romances between the cast that he didn't already set up in his original work (ex. the aforementioned Kaya/Usopp), especially the leading Straw Hats but also among the Marines, and the showrunners had to bend to this demand regardless of their personal opinions.

Let’s be honest, if One Piece were any other Netflix original series, Koby and Helmeppo probably would be a thing by now. (Don’t give us that look, you know they would.) But Maeda insists there’s merely a “bromance” between those two Marines, whose stories are both being expanded from the original manga.

“I wanted Koby to have a relationship that grew and changed as they went along, becoming unlikely allies after being hardened enemies at the beginning.”

Yeah, and thank God for that. Just one of many bullets this thing managed to miraculously dodge.

Among the non-woke stuff, Nami herself is still a pale redhead at least, and an oppressed minority is the biggest and vilest villain of the season (Arlong - hilariously, the scene where he interacts with a corrupt Marine captain came across as a BLM activist shaking down a Soros-owned police chief or politician). There's a scene where Zoro's childhood friend/rival Kuina rants about the natural biological edge men have over women, which I am frankly astounded was allowed into a Netflix show in Current Year+8. This is also the first major media production I've seen in a long time where a male character hits on almost every woman he meets, as he does in the original, and isn't constantly crapped on by the rest of the cast & the script for it (Sanji). Latino Luffy and black Usopp didn't bother me since according to Oda himself (in a reply to fan mail from 2009) a real-life Luffy would be Brazilian and Usopp, African.

Finally, I checked out some of the behind-the-scenes clips, including one where Luffy's actor goes to Shueisha HQ; one where he meets Oda himself; and one where the cast thanked Oda & the fandom right before the series started airing. These people either did a good job of seeming like, or actually were, enthusiastic & happy to be there, which must have moved mountains in terms of generating positive buzz among the OP fanbase. Especially compared to the cast & crew of Cowboy Bebop, who ranged from at best apathetic (John Cho) or at worst and far more often downright hostile (Daniella Pineda) to their source material & its fans, or the Witcher writer's room regularly mocking Sapkowski's work & flaming displeased fans on Twitter. Amazing what not being a massively stuck-up, condescending asshole can do for you in the realm of public relations.

So yeah, that concludes my impromptu review of the OP live-action, which I would rate a 6.5-7/10. Generally watchable with some good segments, not-too-shabby fidelity to the source material and the modern woke intersectional trash being kept to the margins, which basically makes it a divine miracle by the standards of anime/manga live-action adaptations. I'm actually curious about the renewal just for being a non-totally-shit adaptation, remains to be seen if Oda can keep breathing down Netflix's neck and sustain anything like this quality going forward. (I'm not optimistic about THAT to say the least, but Season 1 even being basically decent already seemed impossible to me, so who the hell knows.)

Tbh, that wasn't entirely true of the OG Antifa, who most certainly would stand their ground & engage in mutual firefights with their Freikorps and Reichsbanner (Weimar-era democratic militia) opponents back in the Germany of the early 30s. So even in that regard today's leftist street fighters have fallen far from their predecessors.

And yep, that was the last of them (Gaige Grosskreutz AKA Byecep, the 'perfidious burglar' I mentioned above). Got close enough to Rittenhouse to attempt a headshot at point blank with his pistol by faking a surrender, only for it to turn out that his would-be victim was still faster on the draw.

Alas, women pushing their men in positions of power to get what they want done from behind the scenes has been a thing since time immemorial. Not even Islamic empires have been able to avoid this, even if they were otherwise extremely effective at forcing women to stick purely to soft power and smacking them back down whenever they wanted to rule in their own right.

It's been a while since I re-watched the footage of Rittenhouse playing his glorious orchestra with the bodies of leftist scum, but if I remember rightly, the mob mostly backed off after he somehow missed Jump Kick Man twice at close range and then killed Skater Boi with that point-black heartshot - only the perfidious burglar still had the nerve to pull anything at that point. (I do distinctly recall there was at least one black guy who immediately threw his hands up & backed off after Rittenhouse blew Grosskreutz's bicep away, and one other Antifaggot in a black mask who cowered to the side despite visibly still wielding what looked like a 2x4 or baseball bat.)

They might have been bold enough to try coming after him when he had his back turned to them and actively trying to flee toward the police line without even looking behind him, but lost heart and began to rout the instant he showed that he was still able and willing to fight after all. Crazy folks to be sure, but still too cowardly to attack someone who fired a few bullets at the rioters who got closest to him, without even actively shooting into their ranks in general. (Though they would certainly have deserved that too.)

That's how it always goes with these types. Overgrown bullies to a man whose sadistic glee and perversion is matched only by their extreme cowardice, eager to jump on excuses to shit on others and lord it above them (which is absolutely a massive part of troonery's appeal), but quick to look for the exit when someone they thought would be just another victim stands up to them. Look how quickly Not-So-Macho-Ma'am here goes from snarling at the top of his lungs and calling the father a bitch to piping down and explaining how he was totally born intersex (like he even knows what that actually entails) when the latter stands his ground. And I've seen enough videos to know for damn sure he's not the only leftist tranny soldier who acts that way.

You can see it every time Antifa goes out to start trouble. They've got to outnumber their opponents 10:1 or more, enjoy the backing of Soros-bought DAs who will let them riot with impunity, bring weapons up to & including guns to brawls, and more often than not they STILL keep losing when whoever (be it Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer in Portland, the cops themselves on occasion, doesn't really matter) they're attacking swing back. Saint Kyle blew three of their number away in Kenosha and despite outnumbering him 100:1 the rest of the mob didn't dare press on against him, not even when he had his back turned to them again.

In a better time, these vermin would be the kind wholly excluded from the existing code of honor in the region. They'd be the bandits or peasant insurgents that get their asses whipped by the local knight even when they enjoy a 10:1, 20:1 or 50:1 advantage in numbers and who said knight can mow down without mercy as they flee in terror for their lives, because no matter whether he's a paladin in shining armor or a villainous robber-knight himself, he knows chivalry doesn't apply to opponents of this caliber.

Sir, you’re going to have a problem if you keep going into women’s bathrooms, somebody’s going to do something to you.

Oh, I certainly hope someone does and does it to this walking, talking piece of shit soon, mister. May the next protective father he spits threats & insults at be less forgiving than you.

The funniest shit I've heard from these sorts is that any woman under 5'6" is automatically a loli, even if she is explicitly a stacked college student (Uzaki-chan) or office worker (My Tiny Senpai) or witch (Sorceress from Dragon's Crown, for anyone who recalls Jason Schreier calling people who didn't hate her design a pedo back in 2014 when Gamergate was just starting to take off).

You know what the average adult female height in America is? 5'3". In Canada it's 5'4" and in Japan it's a measly 5'2". Twitter freaks don't have any idea what they're talking about, as usual, but that goes double for when they pretend to know what people actually look like in meatspace. I bet their propaganda-addled brains actually think that 1/5 to 1/2 of people everywhere are gay, that blacks constitute at minimum 33% of the American populace and that every society in history up to & including medieval Europe and Japan were as multiracial as present-day LA, as well.

Been dead since 1963 at the latest. John Diefenbaker was the last PM who gave a shit about the concept of Canada as anything more than a resource-extraction colony & playground for the Laurentian elites (this was why he autistically defended keeping the Red Sign, the pre-leaf Canadian flag, and insisting on having it adorn his casket instead of the latter when he died). And for that, JFK & LBJ actively interfered in the election to the extreme of lending the Liberals their cutting-edge campaign team to make sure he lost the 1963 election.

The Liberal who ousted him with foreign aid, Lester B. Pearson, was as blatant a globalist tool as they came (he aspired to be, and would have preferred being, General Secretary of the UN over PM of Canada) and never won a majority government in his own right, instead having to govern as a coalition partner with the NDP (the socialist party). In his tenure he accomplished nothing except being a stooge of LBJ's and giving said socialists a wedge into government at the highest levels. Yet he's the one who Canada's biggest airport is named after, not Dief the Chief.

Canada's been a dead country walking for decades, just waiting for someone to stick a fork into it. Bernier and the PPC realistically have no chance and will never be given a chance by the TPTB to govern, the Conservatives & Liberals are more likely to form a coalition to stop him before that happens. Best anyone here can hope for is that Poilievre marginally slows things down (because, as the OP demonstrates, he sure as all hell isn't going to actually stop our slide into Hell) before the whole thing goes splat against rock bottom.

Beer bottles? Real men slay drones with javelins.

There were still veterans going back to DA:O or even further back left? Thought the last of them got pushed out even before the Wu-Flu hit.

I think it was because Trudeau got the meme going by infamously proclaiming 'Because it's 2015' when asked why he insisted on having a 50:50 male:female balance in his cabinet.

In his defense, I doubt Oda is up to date with the Western gender insanity of Current Year+8 and just thought it'd be a funny/in-character thing to do.

And my point is that that's false, Christians aren't a bigger or even equivalent threat compared to leftards. If they were, the '80s (when America had a far more moralistic President who was actually, and enthusiastically, backed by the Christian right and gave them more power than Clinton ever did) would be a vastly more forgettable and more puritanical decade than it was. I literally just provided an example for all the categories you brought up - video games (Sark vs. Thompson and their consequent effects on the industry), music (the PMRC) and movies (Disney Wars) - as to why that's the case.

Hell, even the infamous 'tabletop bad/D&D will drag you to Hell' moral panic wasn't started by the Christian right, at worst Evangelicals just joined a bandwagon which first got rolling thanks not to them but to CBS' 60 Minutes special on the subject and Mazes and Monsters (a movie directed by Steven Stern and based on a book by Rona Jaffe, neither of whom seem to be right-wingers or even Christians if you take a crack at their Early Life).

Furthermore it was zealous Catholics Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito who helped strike down California's ban on the sale of 'violent' vidya to kids under a certain age, and the former (probably the most hard-right Justice the country has had post-FDR years, right up there alongside Thomas) penned the majority opinion. The person who came up with that law was not a Republican, much less any other sort of right-winger, or a Christian himself.

This nigger either really thinks he can convince KiA2, or even worse actually believes, that Christians are a bigger threat to vidya, music or movies than the Left in the Year of Our Lord MMXXIII. Lmao.

Jack Thompson did not manage to damage the videogame industry even 1/100th as badly as Anita Sarkeesian did, may the Young Turks pursue her forever in the deepest pits of Hell. He's not the one responsible for Abby Armstrong being the primary standard of beauty against which every female videogame character in the West must be measured against for acceptability by their creators, the injection of woke intersectional themes and caricatures into seemingly every other AAA game, etc. after all, she is. The most fervent Bible-thumpers of the 1980s didn't hate Star Wars as much as Rian Johnson did and even if they had, they still couldn't have hurt that franchise even 1/100th as badly as he and Kathleen Kennedy have done. And so on, so forth.

Also the 'think of the children!!!'-esque censorship drive happened primarily in the 1990s, ie. the Clinton years, and I would hardly characterize Hillary Clinton or Tipper Gore (you know, the founder & main driver of the PMRC) as Bible-thumpers. Quite the contrary. The Moral Majority-backed Reagan was in charge for the 80s and that decade's entertainment was actually a good deal steamier (for both sexes!) than ours, you would be crucified for making something like Flashdance today.

No need to imagine, they're very insistent about doing it to One Piece too. And not just activists but the official dubs themselves, too.

Whoa, I think this is unfair to Imp. Not only did he post a take I could kinda agree with once in a blue moon, not only did he sometimes identify actual problems even if his proposed solutions and associated ramblings were bugfuck insane, but even his craziest 'arguments' and rants were at least kinda original. If only because the sort of femoid-despising vitriol he got up to wasn't something easy to find 15 or 10 years ago.

The new clowns just sound like the fedora'd, mean-spirited, wannabe-edgy, self-important atheists from 2005 who must fervently believe they are enlightened by their own intelligence because otherwise, their fragile glass-like ego would collapse and all that crippling insecurity they're trying to hold back would consume them. They aren't new and they don't have anything new or interesting to say, I've heard it all before I even reached puberty. If you've seen one in a Youtube comment section from back then, you've seen them all, long before Atheism+ got going and many of them ended up trooning out.

At this point you're making me wish that - far from just one guy posting Bible quotes daily - we actually had some Evangelical fundie diehard straight out of the ranks of the Moral Majority moderating this site, for no reason other than to piss your histrionic ass off.

The extreme emphasis Asian households put on education as one's primary route to advancement within society (a leftover of the legacy of imperial exams & mandarins in not just China, but the entire historical Sinosphere - the system actually lasted longer in Vietnam than it did in China itself, for example) inevitably exposes more Asians to Marxist brainwashing in academia, hence why the younger generations often shift far to the left of their parents.

I've noticed signs that more young Asians nowadays are starting to resist though, largely driven by leftist worship of blacks, thuggery & criminality which is both fundamentally offensive to their sensibilities and is understood to go directly against their own interests (see: affirmative action and the zealous leftard defense thereof). Which is good, naturally. The modern left does indeed take Mao and his Cultural Revolution as a model for what to do, have been doing so since the Maoist factions like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground became ascendant over the Stalinist CPUSA & took over the driver's seat of American leftism post-60s/70s. And what that entails is so vile, so reprehensible even by the standards of historical commie insanity, that I daresay literally any means is justified to stop it from coming to fruition. The more allies you can get in the fight against it, the better.

To paraphrase an ancient saying, the average person is fit only to be a slave; the real problem is that there's no man fit to be their master nowadays. This was true in the days of Narmer, of Sulla & Marius, of Washington & Jefferson (the Founding Fathers hardly had a good opinion of democracy BTW), and of our days.

The only difference 'liberal democracy' has made is that it gives the commons the illusion that whatever message is being downloaded into their brains is actually there by choice, and that they have any real say in the goings-on being directed by the people holding their leashes. If anything, the modern governments are vastly larger and more intrusive than any classical republic or monarchy - and yet the modern serf accepts surveillance to an extent unthinkable even by Louis XIV 'for his own good', he thinks, and thinks nothing of judges and policemen who explicitly refuse to do their jobs, when past peasants would have lynched them and threatened their successors with the same unless they shape up!

The law is a joke to these people, a bludgeon to be wielded against their enemies and spared from their friends in the streets. The legal profession and the courts are but two of the institutions infiltrated and captured by the left: why would they, whose worldview ultimately boils down to a great struggle between the oppressed (who can do no wrong) and the oppressor (who can do no right) not then use those institutions in service to their interest and against their rivals?

Nothing is going to fundamentally change until right-wingers start enacting lethal vigilante justice against not only leftist footsoldiers, but also any pigs, lawyers and judges who insist on trying to protect them. This may seem like a statement that glows, but I am simply making a statement and observation of fact, not a call to action (as if it'd be a good idea to do it here anyway). In the end no amount of force which Trump wanted to deploy only to keep getting undermined by his own generals and law enforcers, peaceful 'thin blue line' or MAGA counterprotests, etc. put a stop to 2020's Summer of Love: only Kyle Rittenhouse's bullets did that.

With all that that entails, and it's only going to get worse as the previous generations (despite their myriad flaws) die off and these maggot-folk inevitably move up to fill the power vacuum. As abundantly demonstrated by every left-wing hellhole in history, there is no living alongside creatures such as these: if you don't overthrow and destroy them first, the only places they have for you will be either beneath their feet as slaves, or in a gulag/mass grave (the former easily lending itself to the latter).

Even some of the most depraved heretics of old would be horrified at the bile this demoniac spouts. Arius would hear her immeasurably arrogant and evil proclamation that God was present with her as she aborted her children, and unhesitatingly be the one to punch her in a rage himself.

The Presbyterians, as with other liberal modern denominations, deserve the same treatment as the last sect claiming to at once be both Christian and in favor of infanticide so as to spare the babies suffering in life: the Cathars - annihilation to the very last man, woman and demon.