Those Horrible White Children

Sitting down to pee helps you empathize with and support new members of your gender community…
Ages ago, I ran across a comment/posting which said that the truly prepared man sat down to pee so that he would be facing an attacker and his gun would be handy. I don’t think it was satire.

Sitting to pee: it is forcing you to bend the knee, literally. It is not conducive to male bladder emptying–that is not how the plumbing works. And how does your bathroom behavior make trans feel more included? Do you tell all your trans friends? Post it on instagram?

…there’s a pic of the black elf shooting an arrow, holding the bow sort of sideways.
That is the true origin of what is known as “gangsta style.

So, muddled thru some Bored of the Amazon …
My .02 is that the “controversy” is solely to gin up viewers (hey, got me to watch a bit).
The real issue is that it’s crap. 80s sword and sorcery bad, just with more expensive special effects. As far as the tale, tho – it has no more to do with any Tolkien material than say, “Beastmaster”
(Which is better, btw)

Heh. I give it a 98, it has a good beat and you can dance to it.*
*classic reference

But it is curious just how readily much of the media seems bent on conflating criticism of a cultural product with sexism and racial bigotry.
Note that it only goes in one direction. Any actor of pallor who dares intrude on myths, legends or even just contemporary stories from non-pallor people is to be subjected to all manner of charges of cultural appropriation, racism, etc. (e.g. Ghost in the Shell movie). Yet from Hamilton to RoP, cultural appropriation is now mandated.
Cuz “white people have no culture”.
In the case of Tolkien, he drew on all manner of ancient Northern European mythologies in crafting Middle Earth. So the woke complaints that BIPOC people just gotta have black elves and drawves “CUZ we need to see ourselves!” are as ridiculous as the complaints over the film Dunkirk because it was too white and male.
While I haven’t watched an episode of the Rings of Power, the trailer did not inspire me to invest any time. We’ve got a Mary Sue Galadriel and (as noted above) some semi-gangsta elf of enriched melanin.
Meh. We went and saw Top Gun Maverick at the theater again yesterday so I’m happy. Amazon should take a clue on why that movie works so well.

Cuz “white people have no culture”
Because the Romans stole everything from the Greeks. At one time smart people knew this. Smart people. Like really smart who went to Harvard and Yale and shit. We unwashed know this because in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfus’ character says this. And he always plays someone who is smart and went to Ivy Leaguer colleges and stuff. It’s essentially how we know anything. See?

WHOA!
Heh. Showbiz.
And yes, the new Mission: Impossible film is one of the few that look like warranting a trip to the local IMAX. The last three in the series were great fun.

Narnia > LotR. Doesn’t make for better movies, however.

Note that it only goes in one direction. Any actor of pallor who dares intrude on myths, legends or even just contemporary stories from non-pallor people is to be subjected to all manner of charges of cultural appropriation, racism, etc.
Americans encouraged immigrants to identify with Washington and Jefferson with whom they had zero ancestral relationship, the French encouraged immigrants to feel that “nos ancêtres les Gaulois” were their (adoptive) ancestors too, and that was a gesture of generosity, with the expectation that the immigrants would reciprocate by assimilating.
Multikulti has a morally inverted expectation that the host culture belongs to everybody and the outsider cultures belong to the outsiders themselves, at their own discretion – they can be insiders as they see fit and outsiders, advocating against the bigoted insiders, as they see fit, and the insiders are bigots for thinking that they have any moral authority on that subject.
The doctrine that all cultures are equal runs into the contraction that the culture your ancestors created is so impossible to live in that you yourself have gone to a lot of trouble to avoid living in it. The only way of preserving the contraction is that the materially superior culture is morally inferior. and the more materially superior it is, the more people vote with their feet to get there, the more morally inferior it must logically be, and the less morally entitled it is to have a say in who belongs to it.
With Lord of the Rings we have an explicit case that cultural appropriation is right and proper when we do it, that it’s right when we misrepresent the target culture for our for the benefit of our people. When the insiders notice us saying that, that makes them bad people.

…Heinlein condescension don’t stop.
The bit about Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière was good.

@ccscientist: At the risk of being overly geeky, the Clones were phased out soon after the end of the Clone War. Stormtroopers weren’t clones by the time of A New Hope.

By the way, Madeleine Carlisle, who conducted this interview-cum-tongue-bath, has, so far as I can see, still not responded to the people pointing out her, shall we say, curious omissions. It must be quite strange, to write something wildly misleading, and to then, quite quickly, have your attention directed to numerous errors and distortions, and to then act as if none of that occurred. To carry on regardless.

I’ve read Lewis’s other more adult works and didn’t feel being talked down to
Most people are only familiar with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where there’s the least of it; it’s much more obvious in The Last Battle and The Magician’s Nephew. And he just drops the mask entirely in The Screwtape Letters. Taken in their totality, it’s hard not to see a pattern of shallow self-righteousness. By comparison, Tolkien’s humility before God – he refused to call Middle-Earth “his creation”, preferring the term “Sub-Creation” as being necessarily inferior to God’s work – is more compelling for it.
Once I did pick up on it, it seemed a bit overwrought
I have called The Lord of the Rings a great work of literature, but a lousy book. It was written as a novel series because the concept of a massive coffee table book describing a completely fictional realm was not a thing in 1949. I think Dune is a much better written book, but as a very specific allegory it doesn’t have the same universal appeal.
I just now spotted these two items – this one and this one
I get what Marvel is doing: they’re trying to cater to all the wine moms who only watch Marvel movies because their kids do, by creating some kind of weird superhero mashup of Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. But She-Hulk isn’t a kid-friendly show, and the wine moms aren’t going watch it of their own volition. The whole thing feels like a dragged out, unfunny SNL sketch with no pipeline.
Fun easter egg, though: the name of the law firm is the real last names of the original Marvel Bullpen.

thought I’d leave them here for no reason whatsoever
Incredible as it may seem, I’d actually completely forgotten Penny even existed.
(Then again I always did maintain that her main selling point, which she milked for all it was worth, and it turned out to be worth quite a bit, was that she was young. At 35, she can’t really claim to be the voice of doomed youth any more).

It must be quite strange, to write something wildly misleading, and to then, quite quickly, have your attention directed to numerous errors and distortions, and to then act as if none of that occurred.
That describes much of leftist “scholarship”.

cum-tongue-bath
Eww.

Then again I always did maintain that her main selling point, which she milked for all it was worth, and it turned out to be worth quite a bit, was that she was young. At 35, she can’t really claim to be the voice of doomed youth any more).
She’ll be a leader of the Tory party one day. Mark my words.

To Daniel Ream: On Narnia.
I’ll vent a little, too.
C.S. Lewis was often presumptuous and insufferable, in tone. It sometimes comes through in the Narnia books. and frequently in his “Science Fiction Trilogy”. Mere Christianity is smarmy. The Screwtape Letters are just as you characterize them. Add all all that to his twee tendencies, and it can be rough going sometimes. Despite his talent and imagination.
Ironically, Philip Pullman’s own anti-Narnia trilogy has all the same flaws in its authorial voice. I read his book on the writing art, too. It’s even worse, there.
I love Tolkien. Tolkien wrote for himself, and there was never any Sunday school condescension in him while he embodied his heroic themes, both Christian and primordial.

If The Rings of Power is already a joke, why not have an episode in which a statue is built honoring the Hobbit who discovered the Second Breakfast?