wjrii
@wjrii@lemmy.world
- Submitted 1 day ago to [deleted] | 4 comments
- Comment on What is a TV show that was one of your favourites, but just went on for far too long? 1 day ago:
Imagine if they’d let it end when Agrestic burned? It would be remembered as an unblemished gem.
- Comment on What is a TV show that was one of your favourites, but just went on for far too long? 2 days ago:
The Office (US) could have ended when Jim proposed in the rain. It maybe should have ended at the wedding in Niagara. Dear god it definitely should have ended when Michael left. The rest was just a shambling husk with nothing to say and tired gags.
Parks and Recreation also flanderized everybody (on a show that didn’t have much room to spare with how delightfully silly everyone already was as of season 3) and brought on new blood that didn’t work. I still haven’t seen most of the final season.
- Comment on Had enough of my boring job. Now free lancing doing sculptures 4 days ago:
From Springfield.
- Comment on I can't believe they did this 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable about many Americans constantly calling people "black" and "white" and making such a big thing about it? 2 weeks ago:
Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.
Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.
What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.
I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)
- Comment on This garbage 2 weeks ago:
!fountainpens@lemmy.world
Pretty slow, but there are some of us here.
- Comment on Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable about many Americans constantly calling people "black" and "white" and making such a big thing about it? 2 weeks ago:
So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.
Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been dealing with statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.
Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.
I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”
- Comment on I'm looking to buy something like a reverse wheelbarrow, what do I call that? 3 weeks ago:
Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.
If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.
Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.
Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart.
- Comment on Does 'attempted murder' require a viable method? 3 weeks ago:
Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.
The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer." Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.
So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason, and many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.
Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.
TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?
They’re closer to districts, but with more constitutionally described rights. Definitely much more independent than French provinces, and even more than German states or UK constituent countries (devolution is at Parliament’s discretion, for instance), but much, much less than EU countries.
- Comment on Why do i see so many americans obsessed with the concept of "this is a thing that [Ethnicity] does" 4 weeks ago:
That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.
This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.
Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.
I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.
- Comment on Fanhome Reveals Next Star Trek Starship Models, Including the USS Dauntless from Star Trek: Prodigy 4 weeks ago:
I really enjoyed Prodigy, but good lord the Dauntless is fugly.
- Comment on PSA: Some of y'all are overly afraid of scorpions 4 weeks ago:
Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.
- Comment on PSA: Some of y'all are overly afraid of scorpions 4 weeks ago:
So the one in the old fable was even more of a dick than we’d been led to believe. Got it. Image
- Comment on How would he have 6 limbs otherwise? 5 weeks ago:
It clearly pissed him off enough that he refuses to finish the next book.
- Comment on How would he have 6 limbs otherwise? 5 weeks ago:
Perhaps the wings are articulated ribs?
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 5 weeks ago:
I think we definitely want the same thing, at least.
I’m just backing up the (now absent, LOL) person you originally replied to. I think you can – and in Marvel’s case maybe you should, since they are no longer drawing on zeitgeisty, recognizable versions of their comics characters – think about what you want the story to mean at least as early as you do the events that happen in it. King is a talented writer, no two ways about it, but I don’t think you necessarily doom a script to be bad by starting with something like, “I want to tell a story about dealing with the conflict between who we wish we were and what life made us into.”
I reckon that for King, setting events into motion and figuring out the right traits to get characters through them (or to their natural stopping place), or what themes give those particular events meaning, that works for him. If they want to have him write the next Avengers movie, I’d be all for it, LOL. I just don’t think his approach is the only way to go about it.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 5 weeks ago:
Maybe the themes in a Marvel movie will be more universal and rather broadly drawn, but to avoid overstaying their welcome with a rote and repetitive “peril-catharis” cycle, the action needs to be in service to something compelling. Otherwise, it just sort of sputters to the finish line because ultimately we’ve seen the stories before. To the extent he’s not just talking out of his ass, King’s describing a workflow, not a philosophy.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 5 weeks ago:
Beyond anything else, this is also what infected the Star Wars franchise, except there it was even worse because so much of the connective tissue was relegated to novels and comics. At least with Marvel you can keep up just via TV and movies.
Dumped into a new series of films that rehashes the first? Explain it in a bunch of mediocre books! Sequel that thinks that setup was boring (and tbf, it was)? Build up to it in a crappy comic! Petulant manchild takes the worst possible lessons from the first two? Set it up in a video game, lift the plot from old comics, and then tell your animation wunderkind that his entire live-action career will now be to “fix it.”
Disney owns the lion’s share of the blame for both franchises malaise, but fan culture enabled it by obsessing over everything, not insisting on tight storytelling (the number of online people who believe that no deleted scene is too awkward to be edited back in is… disconcerting), and whizzing their pants in glee with every easter egg or end-credits stinger. Honorable mention to Peter Jackson with the LOTR extended editions and ROTK’s eleventy-billion endings that (LOL) still somehow omitted the Scouring of the Shire.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 5 weeks ago:
How to write okayish page-turners that are far from the only valid way to approach literature?
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I have it on good authority that you’re old.
- Comment on Haircut 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Also available in chocolate. 1 month ago:
The UAE in general is an interesting experience. I’ve only been once, but my wife has been several times for work.
The face they want to present has a kind of a Pan-European middlebrow banality (i.e. you want to impress many people who may or may not be all that thoughtful and who definitely speak many different languages and have different cultural touchstones… I am thinking of stuff like the old BASF “nothingburger” ads), combined with an American-like sense of recklessly cheerful enthusiasm for development and economic growth, but wrapped in a cloak of religiosity and always with a barely concealed underpinning of oligarchic authoritarianism.
To be perfectly honest, it felt a lot like what I expect the evil, but less mustache-twirlingly evil, hope America will be. Still open for business, and even superficially welcoming, but with true wealth only going to those selected by the entrenched power structure, with all others allowed to serve at their pleasure and under a bedrock expectation of not disturbing their preferred social order.
- Comment on Also available in chocolate. 1 month ago:
I’ve had chocolate made with camel milk. It was good, though being positioned as a premium thing it probably would have been just as good with cow milk.
- Comment on I mean I would totally give it a try 1 month ago:
Love After Lockup is full of extremely healthy relationships.
Yes, yes, I know, and in fact one does lost interest after a while. Still, some reality trash can be interesting in the first season or two when they’re gathering the initial crop of free-range crazy instead of raising their own herd. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a proper “SovCit” reality franchise.
- Comment on *56k modem noises* 1 month ago:
56k modem noises
I particularly remember the heart-dropping feeling of the repeated changes in pitch as it negotiated a lower baud rate to account for the shitty wiring my dad DIY’d.
- Comment on Molly of... McKinley? 1 month ago:
- Comment on Funny this never made it into a James Taylor song 1 month ago:
TIL James Taylor has a song called “Country Road.”
It is not about West Virginia.
- Comment on We're in the endgame now 1 month ago:
I mean, he did go to the notorious third-tier toilet known as… Yale.
