Overheads
Or, Return of the Honesty Box.
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On pretentious niceness versus honesty.
Can relate.
To pick a fairly obvious example, I can imagine crippling, blinding or killing a burglar, albeit in desperation. Circumstances in which that would be both necessary and moral are not impossible to imagine, far from it.
On the other hand, I cannot imagine circumstances in which I’d spend my evenings breaking into other people’s homes.
Clearly, David, you lack a properly progressive mind.
Oh no. Does it show?
If this gets out, my social diary will be in tatters.
Everything in that post about the malevolence and worthlessness of criminals applies equally to liberals.
It’s hard to see the motives in play as anything other than some bizarrely rationalised hostility towards the law-abiding. The level of unrealism, of contrivance and perversity, of moral wrongness, is difficult to overstate.
As Mr Burkett put it, with good cause, “I find it abhorrent and suicidal. Almost religiously offensive.” And yet, among progressives, such sentiments are commonplace. A mark of piety.
Please allow me to expand that to include the criminals’ friends and families.
Case in point: The girlfriend of the dead thug mentioned in your link.
Fair question.
Answers on a postcard, please.
Not hyperbole: “NPR thinks anybody to the right of Mao is ‘far right’”
Original source on Bluesky.
Resolved: Return to publishing names and photos of juvenile offenders.
And bacon sandwiches.
Short video that summarizes a lot. Worth viewing and fowarding.
https://x.com/GadiTaub1/status/1978175342180213109
Further to which, this.
Because in matters of this kind, visual aids can be helpful.
The girlfriend of the dead thug mentioned in your link.
He was a good guy, as demonstrated by her restraining order against him for assault and vandalism, and who could forget the switchblade of loving kindness.
What struck me, other than the obvious, is the tagline, “Believe in original stories.”
In an advert for a mini-series that exists because of a popular film of the same name, on the same subject, which in turn was based on a play, itself based on another play.
The reflexive reaction to assertions of malevolence has become denial.
The ubiquity of cameras has made that reaction less and less tenable.
Rescinding funding to the CPB was a long overdue act of hygiene.
It seems reasonable to blame the spread of labour-saving appliances.
I don’t remember Mozart being half-Japanese…
Police bodycams and dashcams are now racist.
A postage stamp would be large enough.
I’ve no reason to doubt that Mr William Tomomori Fukuda Sharpe is a good actor, and his performance may, for all I know at this point, be compelling, luminous, etc. But I wonder whether the producers grasp how fatigued much of their potential audience is by this endless racial stunt-casting. Which, at times, has felt not unlike an insult, a two-finger gesture pretending to be piety.
At best, it’s just another thing to get past in order to suspend disbelief and become absorbed in the story. Assuming one is still interested in any such attempt.
As are San Francisco BART public transit security cams.
This is the usual “I just want everyone to understand each other” Lefty boilerplate that can barely contain an innate smugness.
I suppose a smug Paki is less awful than a knife-wielding rapist Paki.
True: “Do not make the mistake of believing that most people are actually thinking.”
The story template, the hero’s journey, is the outsider overcoming the prejudice and hate of the insiders to get the rewards that his talents entitle him to. Even if the hero wasn’t particularly an outsider in real life, the tendency is to seek an outsider angle to hang the drama on (poor, questionable parenthood, gay or susceptible to a queer interpretation, etc).
When a white outsider story is told, non-whites are inserted like a memento mori to remind whites that their outsider stories should be considered as diluted allegories for the truly important outsider stories that they should be paying attention to, of non-whites denied their deserved access and status in white societies.
So the black Ann Boleyn is justified because they lean towards an interpretation of Ann as an outsider in court; and blacks, as the canonical outsiders, are a mythically better fit than any racially realistic casting.
The more frequent memento mori is that the white boxer will have a black trainer, and the white race car driver will have a black mechanic. The black’s job is roll his eyes and smile indulgently at the kinds of problems whites think they have. The effect is to undercut the drama and prevent the audience from entering into its spirit.
The one provides cover for the other.
POC in dramas: in period pieces about Europe, there is an entire reality of the rigid class system that existed during those times, whether about Napoleon or Anne Bolyn or whoever. Much of the story assumes that the reader/viewer understands this. Why can the guy not date the girl? Because he is the lower class or a foreigner or her father does not like him. If you throw in different racial groups at random, it all doesn’t make sense any more. The entire social order is now incoherent and the story does not hang together.
Consider when they added a black ex-stormtrooper to Star Wars. The premise was that stormtroopers were clones and we were to view them as not really people (not having a wife or hobbies). Putting this black character as a stormtrooper blew up the whole conceit. So all of these not-quite-human guys who can’t shoot and are cannon fodder are actually black (because clones)? Should we feel bad for shooting them? It screws with the world created by the early movies. In period dramas it is even worse.
For some inexplicable reason this guy doesn’t want to compete against men.
It was even stupider than that: In an earlier film we saw thousands of very young clones in training. All identical white children, all cloned from the same man–a bounty hunter whose name I forget.
I wasn’t into the canon of Star Wars, so a black stormtrooper didn’t bother me. What annoyed me was their inability to craft an interesting story around him, and he became a galactic Step-in-Fetched for the woman who needed to believe in herself to be the great Jedi.
I’ve mentioned before that the ITV and BBC, in their Agatha Christie adaptations, both featured an interracial couple, and in both cases flubbed it. The ITV “Sparkling Cyanide” should have had the volcanic soccer star rescue his girlfriend from the kidnappers and use their heads for practice kicks. The 2023 “Murder Is Easy” had a redhead Morfydd Clark getting into heated eye contact with David Jonsson. At the end, when he goes back to Kenya to work for independence, she doesn’t go along with him. Even when she points out that she wants to get out of her podunk village and see the world.
Added irony is that the writer and director, who tick off several diversity checkboxes, stood in the way of a satisfying ending, thus putting them on the same side as the old KKK.
At best, it’s just another thing to get past in order to suspend disbelief and become absorbed in the story.
I quite enjoy watching stuff like that with the mildly woke, and waiting for a moment when our heroes would benefit from an ability to summon transportation, send a message long distances, etc.
Me: I don’t get it – why don’t they just use their smartphones?
Mild: Smartphones?!?!? This is set in [Victorian London/18th century Sweden/the Norman Conquest]! Nobody has smartphones!! That would be a preposterous anachronism!
Me: Oh.
…
Me: But what if there were phones just for the black guys?
Oh yes, indeed.
Sci-fi is, ironically, the most dated type of fiction.
Utinam populus Britannicus unam cervicem haberet!
Stock up on the Orville Redenbacher.
What I keep saying about a traitorous ruling class. Oxbridge Quislings.
I can’t answer this question because I’m too much in shock.
Granny had two passions in life…
The result very often being, as noted in the comments here, a combination of premature self-congratulation, low ratings, and cack-handedness, via which the likely historical motives are replaced by something more clumsy and tiresome. And audiences, it turns out, aren’t overly keen on a three-evening reminder that racism is bad, m’kay. At least when white devils do it.
And yet, our self-imagined betters, writing in the Guardian and British Vogue, feigned bewilderment at the less-than-enthusiastic reactions, hastily dismissing, unanswered, the actual expressed complaints. As if demurral, dissatisfaction, could only be invalid, damning proof of bigotry. They were oddly incurious, for supposed journalists. Professional communicators.
As if it were impossible to foresee that a common response to their bizarre race-revised history and its in-your-face distortions might be one of alienation and annoyance, from precisely the audience they needed to attract, including enthusiasts of British history, for whom the racial narrative and casting gimmickry might seem particularly jarring and inapt.
Again, if the goal is a suspension of disbelief, these are odd choices. However, if the goal is something else…
I’m just going to leave this here.
For no reason whatsoever.
I can’t answer this question because I’m too much in shock.
“Retarded” comes to mind.
I was going to say high-maintenance, but we’ll go with yours.
[ Schedules tomorrow’s Ephemera. ]
[ Muffled chuckling. ]
[looks up the meaning of ‘cack-handed’, vows to use it in conversation]
It’s got a cigar indian vibe.