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  • There's even an option to hide the fantasy Internet points entirely. I love that option because I find fantasy Internet point chasing completely risible.

  • Thanks for sharing that with us, Sparky.

  • Except that the age of the mid-budget, self-contained movie is dead. Indies are getting squeezed by this Big Tent nonsense BADLY.

  • Easy for me to say "no", though, which is what I did ages ago. Maybe someday the public will get as bored as I got with seeing the same thing over and over again and will kill this franchise nonsense.

  • I'm tired of all these big tent "franchises" entirely.

    Hey, filmmakers, authors, television producers, etc.: MAKE SOMETHING NEW FFS!

  • "Does not rationale" is "pure, unaltered science"?

    See, to me it is gibberish. "Does" is an auxiliary verb and "not" is a negating modifier (an adverb) that is supposed to be followed by a verb.

    "Rationale" is not a verb. It is a noun.

    For someone telling people to do things that make them think you're astonishingly bad at the activity in question yourself. For someone telling people to communicate in words, you're astonishingly bad with words yourself. Were this a religious argument I'd be pointing you to that thing about specks and beams right about now.

  • Thinking is obviously good. Yet you don't do it.

    Let's say I post a scientific paper. Have you looked at a scientific paper recently? Count the diagrams, photographs, etc.

    Extrapolate.

  • Consider it yoinked. I'm going to use that one from now on.

  • Atheism isn't a religion. Full stop. From that one statement you made the rest is safely dismissible.

  • I think you're missing a few key points:

    1. It's a COMEDIC series, not a serious drama. It's Adams taking potshots at things that struck him as funny or upset him. Like the whole "shoe event horizon" thing was an eloquent rant about how he couldn't find shoes that fit one day. (No, really!) The fact that it blew up into this massive thing was an accident, not a design, and he didn't set out to write a Serious SF Series™.
    2. The "Britishness" of the relationships is part of that comedy. He's making fun of Brits' "reserve".
    3. The Fenchurch thing never really fit into the vibe, and given the series' entire schtick of random things occurring out of nowhere and then vanishing into nowhere (like the guy whose every incarnation was killed by Arthur Dent), it's on-point for her to just vanish into nothingness. (And as for his reaction, consult point 2.)

    TL;DR Summary

    This is a comedic series best viewed as a collection of incoherent, inconsistent vignettes with an underlying theme (kind of like the more serious The Martian Chronicles of Ray Bradbury), not as a serious space drama spread out over books.

  • OK, let me unpack a few things here.

    1. It is emphatically not racist to criticize a government's actions.
    2. It is emphatically racist, however, to assume every (perceived) citizen of a government's nation is uncritically accepting of their government.

    And here's where it gets messy.

    The China Watchers™ crowd always says they "hate the government, not the citizens". (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with "hate the sin, not the sinner" whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)

    Yet...

    Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government's actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who "hate the government, not the citizens" take perceived citizens to task for their government's actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments' actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don't have).

    Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the "hate the government, not the citizens" crowd with a zeal that puts the "not the citizens" part of things in the firm category of "blatant lie".

    And that is just flat-out racism.

    So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren't being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it's my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.

    You don't like that default? Well, here's a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: "Rein in your crazies or you'll be mistaken for them."

  • They don't tend to scream for blood. Just ask.

  • I'm at work. I can't watch video at the moment.

    But I can make some guesses.

    "Random stranger with a camera crew walks up to a citizen of an authoritarian state and asks 'do you know what happened today?'."

    Fuck yeah I'm going to turn away and walk off. Hell I'd be tempted to do it in Canada! (Not a fan of most Canadian media.)

  • ... how could the Chinese government enforce this vast national amnesia of a major, recent event in their country's history, one in which the government sent troops to slaughter perhaps 2,600 peaceful protesters?

    In the very first paragraph Vox gets it wrong.

    Not a surprise.

    Here's a little hint: look up Columbia University's Columbia Journalism Review and see if you can tell why I'm laughing at Vox right now.

  • If you can't work out the difference between "lived in China for 23 years" and "is Chinese" then there's no help for you.

    Of course you couldn't read a statement that baldly said the PRC's government wasn't a good one, so there's that for you as well.

  • Oh, this is going to be juicy!

    Tell me what you think happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. I'll wait with the reams and reams and reams of corrections on standby. (Hint: There's a very good chance that literally everything you "know" about Tiananmen Square is wrong. Just as a taste of what's to come if you take the bait: "tank man" wasn't run over by a tank. No matter what you think you know.)

  • I'm not going to be courteous with people who are screaming for my wife's and son's blood. Sorry. I'm sure that makes me a bad person, but someone doing that isn't going to get courtesy from me. They're going to get ... let's call it "extreme discourtesy" and leave it at that.

  • Well given that the idiot thinks I'm a) Chinese and b) in favour of the Chinese government, you're absolutely right: nothing got through.