Wow, absolutely the opposite reaction to me.

I thought Rogue One was a travesty of film making. The characters were bland and underdeveloped, the plot made little sense and the dialogue was awful. The only redeeming aspect were the special / practical effects and art.

I would criticise Force Awakens for treading safe in replicating the plot of A New Hope to a ridiculous degree but the characters had a sense of identity, purpose and relatability. Most of the set pieces (Han Solo, Jakku, Falcon escape) were memorable.

The lightsaber battle definitely suffered from FX over-use. What made the one in Empire Strikes Back compelling is the austere focus of it as a battle of wills. At least this one was less ridiculous than the lava clusterfuck of Revenge of the Sith.

For Kylo Ren, a lot will depend on whether he remains a bland, corrupted villain or develops into a repentant anti-hero. Hopefully they won't follow the Vader/Emperor arc too closely. In any case, he's certainly going to take back seat to Snoke as primary villain.

I remember having to buy new edition Calculus book ($100+) because they switched the texts between calc 2 and calc 3. Wasn't this shit invented 400 years ago? Did I really need a new book with slightly different questions? apparently so.
Meanwhile the author (Stewart) lives in a multi-million dollar ocean-front mansion on the west coast.

Fun fact: the Indian government regulates textbook costs, and even though the editions sold there are paperback only and lower-quality print, they are <1/10th the cost of western-published books with identical content. (It's illegal to export them out of India though.) Isn't it nice when a democracy works for the people rather than for corporations?

Transporters are creepy anyway.

"Yes. You will cease to exist, but we will create an identical copy of you somewhere else, so needn't worry!"
"But my consciousness will be transported right? Into the new body?"
"Errrrrrrrr. Maybe!"

Bill C-16 adds "gender identity or expression" to the list of things protected by anti-discrimination law under the Canadian Human Rights Code.

The transsexual and gender non-binary communities are insisting that not using their preferred pronouns qualifies as discrimination, and therefore now punishable under this amendment.

Dr. Peterson argues that forcing people through the law to use pronouns created by this minority resembles how fascist ideologies of the past have functioned. A bad precedent to set, and not how natural societal mechanisms of language adoption function. He also seems to object to the long list of made up pronouns the gender-fluid types are insisting on.

One example of language adoption I ran across, without going into detail, was the creation and use of "Ms."

Watch further, particularly his videos on authoritarian regimes. His issue is that controlling language with force is a hallmark of classic far left regimes (ie. Lenin/Stalin's Russia, Mao's China etc), so his beef is not only with the uni, it's with the government and the deluded (or worse, calculated) morons who think that state sanctioned and enforced speech is a "good thing".

He has spent decades studying authoritarianism and makes compelling arguments as to why the current "SJWs" are almost identical to the precursors of other authoritarian regimes.

I don't ask anyone to take anything said at face value, but Peterson does the due diligence for his arguments, and will often defer answering a question if he doesn't think he can offer a well reasoned response. I've yet to see a single video where he has said anything negative about trans people (as opposed to saying negative things about a government law to force language), yet he is described as a homophobe because it's far easier to label him to discredit him than to actually listen to what he is saying.

I never claimed to or would say I speak for all of any group. Congrats on assuming.

I fail to see how fighting against equal protection for trans people under hate crime laws isn't transphobic. And his flimsy defense of "it will force me to call someone something i dont want to" isn't true of the bill in the slightest if you read the thing and mostly a smoke screen for his distaste for trans acceptance. The place where Peterson works adopted almost identical protection for trans individuals in 2014. But he hasn't noticed or been effected... because it doesn't do what he thinks.

And your analogy is stupid and reductive. Someone being upset they can't call people "faggot" anymore because of PC nonsense doesn't put you on the same level of marginalized groups fighting for basic rights anymore than his refusal to accept that trans people get to self identify / get equal protection puts him anywhere close to the trans and gay people fighting at Stonewall for the right to exist.

Regardless of all of that, I wasn't talking to you and I was offering someone who seemed genuinely interested in the other side some view of that side. I'm not interested in the vitriol from some rando on the internet who has made being "anti-sjw/anti-feminist" an identity.

Club Penguin has mapped your genetic sequence and is producing clones of you that are fully hacking your identity. CAPTCHA needs to be updated in order to differentiate between you and the infinite number of clones of you.

"I like how un-American they are when talking about how American they are."

By your logic, I'd argue that saying they are un-American because of their proclaimed identity is also "un-American". (note, I don't believe either you or them are being "un-American")

The reality is, you don't get to define what being an American is and neither do they. That's one of the whole points of the freedoms spelled out in the United States Constitution.

Of course you can say what you "want" an American to be. And you can do that in a group in public. And someone else can refute that. But neither you or them can force that on any other citizen (ignoring laws/regulations that everyone has to abide by).

Wow.

Nothing happened "last night" and POTUS has no idea what the words he says actually mean.

But they do have higher criminality in Sweden these days than they were used to. And it is not so much not reported on, rather the racial and national identity and names of the perpetrators are being (correctly) not publicised. Frustrating for some policemen and the lynch-hungry mob, but according to the law.

My memory of the original movie is that it was that there was about 5 minutes of the characters philosophizing on the difficulty of self-identity in a cyber world amid an hour and a half of sexy sci-fi robot murder sprees. I think they can match that.

So the Republicans left the Conservatives and took the party to the left, meanwhile the SJW's took the Democratic party and drug it out to the WAY WAY out to the left?

In any effect, I agree with him in just about every way, and welcome him to come join us "tea baggers". We aren't nearly as racist, homophobic, or bible thumping as the media makes us out to be.

Not saying those people don't exist, but they are a really, really small fringe, and putting their identity on a whole group of people is like saying all left wingers are in perfect alignment with BLM or OWS groups.

Couldn't agree more! The writer is pretty fresh and the director(s) are stunt guys. Beyond that, I don't know much about the production, but both John Wick and John Wick 2 are precise and well choreographed gunfu with elements of the Matrix/Indigo Prophecy, Hitman, Assassin's Creed, Bruce Lee movies, and on and on. Star power, as well.

I have Jack Reacher (same writer as Usual Suspects), John Wick, Collateral (Michael Mann), and Jason Bourne in the same stack.

In 2002, when I was studying film I had a chance to listen to Doug Liman, the director of The Bourne Identity talk about the making of the film. He hadn't really done much at the time, but now he's in the thick of these highly stylized, star powered, accurate (bullet count, stunts, etc.) Action flicks.

I don't personally have an issue with hijabs,niqabs, or burkas. I do object to women being forced to wear them in countries that practice Sharia or if the husband is forcing them to.

I do think that for identification purposes, you should at least be able to see the face. This would be on an official document proving identity (license,passport) and, if detained, the law enforcement official should be allowed to match the identification. This would really only apply to the burka/niqab, since those obscure the face heavily.

Me too.

I read a review of Identity Thief when it first came out that nailed the reason she is so very very good.

Silly little slapstick broad comedy, right? And the reviewer said -- I'm watching it and I'm like, what? What is she doing? She's ACTING. She is actually living truthfully each and every beat.

Those weren't his words, of course. I translated them into to Actor Speak from my many acting classes I have taken.

But yeah. She rocks my world.

29 comments, most of them rather long and more-or-less well reasoned, yet none about the content.

I get if you don't trust RT. It's a propaganda outlet of a foreign government, after all. But RT is not Chemical Ali style of propaganda: it is solid, well-researched reporting on many topics, subtly slanted on others, and completely balls-to-the-wall denial of reality on others again.

You want to take that as a reason to ignore it entirely? Knock yourself out.

I won't. Which isn't saying much, because I prefer text over video.

Anyway, they regularly offer a valuably "Korrektiv" with regards to reporting in the mainstream media. Of course I would prefer if I could get that from a less-dubious outlet like, maybe, the Indepedant, or the NZZ, but I can't.

Let's talk about the content of this clip, shall we.

Hedges references the Prop-or-Not pieces run by the WaPo. Does anyone here disagree that those were a total and utter smear job? Painting Truthout, Truthdig, Counterpunch, Alternet, BlackAgendaReport, NakedCapitalism and others as stooges of the Kremlin is such an obvious attempt to discredit dissenting voices that it's, quite frankly, rather offensive. Yves Smith and Glen Ford as mouthpieces of the Kremlin... my ass cheeks.

On the other hand, quite a lot of journalists in the US seem to have embraced the Red Scare with open arms, seeing as it gives an excuse as to why their previous HRC lost against the orange-skinned buffoon. Kyle illustrated it nicely with Rachel Maddow.

Second point: they had James Clapper present the report. Seriously? The fucker was caught lying under oath during the initial stages of the NSA revelations. Wasn't the fuckface also in charge of the satellite reconnaisence prior to the Iraq war, who could have presented imagery that debunked the claims of WMD "factories", and decided not to? He is just as trustworthy as Chemical Ali, but less entertaining.

Third: half the report was about RT. Why? I thought it was meant to outline how they "hacked" the election? What does their propaganda outlet have to do with that? And the critique they presented... has anyone read the passage about the "alleged Wall Street greed"? They are having a laugh, and people take it seriously.

Fourth: it distracts from the aspects of HRC's loss they don't want to be a subject of public discussion: class issues. They offered nothing for the working class, who got a shoddy deal over the last decades, and tried to focus entirely on identity politics, completely denying even the existence of class issues. Which is also why it's now the "white, male worker" who is to blame. Nevermind that >50% of white, female workers also voted Trump. Nevermind that significant portions of non-white working class folks also voted Trump. Can't be. According to the narrative, these people are minorities first, working-class second, and identity politics always trumps class politics. Except it didn't.

All this rage at the "deplorables", the "less educated"... it just reeks massively of class bigotry. Those plebs decided to vote for someone other than our beloved Queen HRC? How dare they...

And finally, RT's own part of this segment, about the credibility of the intelligence community's claims. Any disagreement on this? Anyone? Anyone think the torturers at the CIA are trustworthy enough to take their word without hard evidence?