I believe that you are correct, and Carr was not actually fined or otherwise legally penalized for his remarks.

However, it *was* a possibility that he would be, according to the first line in the article I linked to in my first post in this thread:
"Jimmy Carr could face sanctions for making a joke about dwarves during an appearance on BBC1’s The One Show."

I believe that I read other news articles that suggested that was a possibility at the time it happened, but I can't find anything with a real quick search now.

Going outside of the scope of that single incident, I definitely have seen quite a few reports of things that I would consider to be fairly trivial incidents like this being looked at by the UK government as "hate speech" and therefore potentially subject to "fines, imprisonment, or both" (according to that wikipedia article).

Samples from a quick search include a politician being arrested for quoting a passage about Islam from a book by Winston Churchill, a young man who was jailed for 12 weeks because of "some offensive Facebook posts making derogatory comments about a missing child" (it doesn't say what the posts were exactly; I am not saying I would defend his posts but I don't think anyone should go to jail for being an idiot and running their mouth on the internet), and another young man who was fined for saying that "all soldiers should die and go to hell". Plenty more incidents beyond those as well, it seems.

So while Jimmy Carr didn't end up actually facing any legal repercussions for his joke, I think it is not far fetched at all to suggest that he might have (and there seems to be some evidence that legal repercussions enacted by the government were being considered in that particular incident).

That is what seems crazy / wrong to me. That is NOT freedom of speech; it is freedom of benign speech, with an increasingly narrow view of what speech is benign.

I'm 100% OK with their being "consequences" for Jimmy Carr for his joke. But the government shouldn't be involved in that (and again, to be fair they DID end up staying out of it in that case). The consequences that I think are fine include:

* Ofcom or the BBC passing on some/all of any fines that the government levels against them on to Carr (ie., IF they get fined for breaking broadcast decency standards, make Carr foot the some or all of the bill for that).

* Ofcom or the BBC electing not to invite Carr to appear on any more programs if they are concerned about preventing fines / protecting their image / whatever. They are a business, they gotta look out for themselves.

* Individual people who were offended by Carr's joke boycotting programs that he appears on, refusing to pay to attend his live performances, etc. Obviously. If you don't like what he has to say, you are are of course not obliged to continue to listen to him.

Anything beyond those consequences is going too far in a society that claims it is democratic and free, in my opinion.

Wait, how is the combination of words "Dwarf shortage" uttered within the bounds of a comedy show offensive to anyone? Why? Wtf?

Its not a joke that carries much meaning, besides the fact that it might be mocking the political correctness brigade a bit.

The second sentence might be the one that breaks the broadcast code, because basically anything you might happen to say to a dwarf can be theoretically deemed to be insulting.

Dwarves are fierce warriors, so I would definitely err on the side of caution there and cross the road if I see a dwarf coming.

It is as easy to claim being offended as it is for a soccer player to fall. How many of those offended were even real dwarves?

What I get as the "point" of the One Ring is
A) backup / fallback plan in case Sauron is killed so he won't be completely destroyed (containing some of his soul / essence)
B) a trap to facilitate his control of the other races by tempting and corrupting them

And I think your take on the reason for the invisibility is correct according to the way Tolkien intended it. But it still doesn't sit real well with me. To me it feels better to imagine the whole ring story as a take on "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".

The other rings of power are interesting. The three for the elves are largely free of the influence of the one, because Celebrimbor was already very suspicious of Sauron / Annatar when he made them. So the elves can and do continue to use them, though warily.

The seven for dwarves aren't discussed a lot, but hinted that they help corrupt the dwarves natural appreciation for gems and gold into a darker greed for those things. That dovetails into stuff in The Hobbit pretty well. So, while they don't corrupt dwarves in the same way they do men, they DO lead to isolation and and factionalization of the dwarves, which I suppose could have been Sauron's intent.

The nine for humans seem to work quite well as judged by Sauron's intent for them.


I guess that overall, I just feel like temptation and corruption of wearers of the one ring seems like a very elegant way to achieve Sauron's goals when he made it. A ring that grants the wearer the single ability that they most desire but also will be most tempted to abuse would be very difficult for people (and elves or dwarves or whoever) to resist. Gandalf and Galadriel are directly offered the ring but refuse only because they both *know* that they would be corrupted by it. I don't see invisibility as enough of a game-changing ability for either of them to be so confident that they couldn't handle it.

But the point of the One Ring wasn't to corrupt its wearer, no? I thought that was just a side-effect of it a)containing part of some evil dudes soul b) having a sort of will of its own and wanting to get back to aforementioned evil dude. Equally I thought the reason the ring makes people invisible is a byproduct of it pulling the wearer into whatever bizarro interdimension that the ring-wraiths and sauron semi-inhabit. Hence why Sauron et al can immediately see the wearer despite spending the rest of the time frantically scanning every corner of middle earth as a creepy big eye thing. I thought the idea was that the ring was only truly powerful in the hands of Sauron, given it was sort of a large part of him, and in combination with the other rings of power, the owners of which it was _meant_ to control.

No, my complaint would be that despite investing so much into it, it kinda fails. Turns out the Dwarves are basically incorruptible and the elves immediately sense they have been conned and stop using their 3. Perhaps he should have made more than 9 for the men.

I can't fathom the number of animals I've murdered in video games...

I believe I've killed at least 1000 boars in one sitting. We're digital mass murderers! But that's ok, I have also been digitally sentenced, imprisoned, digitally raped and murdered, and digitally risen from the grave to have my vengeance on the Tolkien universe --

The numbers of elves and dwarves and humans and gnomes that have met their untimely death at my undead hands, wrapped in leather, cloaked in shadows -- another very large number of killings.

You may refer to me as a High Warlord of Blackrock Mountain. Rawr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Death to ALL life! May the black dragonflight rise again! May they roast endless numbers of sheep.

Invisibility isn't a power of the One Ring so much as a side-effect. It shifts mortal wearers a little into the spirit world, so they fade from view in the physical. Sauron doesn't disappear when he wears the ring because he already exists in both worlds and he can see other wearers for the same reason. It's not widely discussed, but this should also be true of other maiar; Gandalf, Saruman and Durin's Bane; and 'high' elves who've been to Valinor: Galadriel and Glorfindel would all also be unaffected by ringvisibility. It's this walking the threshold between worlds that's also responsible for the extended lifespan of mortal ringbearers and why Frodo can see the ringwraiths and they can see him.

The elemental character of the Three, I think, shouldn't be overstated. All of the rings, the One, the Three, the Seven and the Nine are very much alike. They were all made by or under the tutelage of the same creator to the same basic recipe, with independent elven flourishes rather than fundamental differences in the case of the Three. The One has to resonate (musical metaphors are always appropriate for Tolkien's magic) with the others in order to work on them, and that's Sauron's mistake: he is ultimately trapped and destroyed by his ring just as the dwarves and men were by theirs.

I was originally on board with the idea of expanding the Hobbit to fill in the back story of Lord of the Rings. I always thought it was odd that Tolkien just threw in this world shatteringly important event that happens off page.

But so far the two movies have been disappointing. Too long and too many improbable chase scenes. The whole pointless "dwarves vs Smaug" fight scene was just awful.

Holmes and Watson were decent enough in their scenes, but yeah, there was just way too much filler.

8 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Skillful indeed.

I'm convinced Russians are like dwarves from the Hobbit movie where no matter how utterly audacious the physical movement, they have it under control because every single Russian is skillful enough enough to account for the odd, but aptly timed behavior of other Russians.

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Red queen effect: Parasitic humans feed off of the cow, steals the natural flowing water and installs human-centric water holes. In competition with the human parasite the cow is forced to learn to use the water pump. And thus the arms race between cow and human.

Who will win?

My money is that humans destroy themselves and cow survives, finally free of it's parasitic relationship with the upright mammals. They then go on to evolve into upright cow people. Only to encounter the humans again.

They then join with the radioactive green humans (nuclear fallout survivors) and zombie humans (the ones that didn't survive the fallout but were taken over by parasites of their own) to kill the humans, many of whom are dwarves and really small midgets.

Some hippies that bonded with trees are found to have survived, each with their own vision of what it is to be a tree hugger. Some of them join the humans (with their now dominant midget genes) and some of them join the green humans and cow people.

Along the way we discover that in China pandas have evolved into panda people and all along there were werewolves and shit. Including dimensions made entirely of fire with slimes that thrive off of radiation, only to become what is perceived as fire elementals and H.P. Lovecraft's things were real too. Oh and the entire pantheon of all people from all of time.

Society rebuilds itself but war never changes.

The kind of sarcastic, awkward "The Office"-style humour they introduced into the first Hobbit movie was a real turn-off for me, as was the sloppy, rushed-looking CGI (there's a scene at Rivendell where they didn't even bother replacing the scale doubles' faces with the actors' faces) and the odd habit of having the characters fall hundreds of feet onto solid rock without breaking any bones (this happens at least three times in An Unexpected Journey).

The Hobbit is a children's book, and doesn't meet the tone of its sequel very well, even after Tolkien's revised edition. It is a lighter book than the Lord of the Rings, in every sense, and the first film showed that it really can't bear the weight of either the padding PJ has added to the story, nor the efforts to bring a more Rings-style feeling of epic seriousness to what is a small, selfish story about some dwarves looking for gold. The epic/serious tone constantly conflicts with the childish slapstick humour, meaning that neither really work.

It would have been much better as a single 2.5-hour film. I dread to think how much wandering about, awkward humour, diversions from the story, too-weighty extracts from the LOTR appendices and (oh goody) dull Elven love story padding is to come in the next 6 hours of this trilogy.

It's interesting that your traditional fantasy strongmen types (Robert Baratheon, Ned Stark, Robb Stark, Khal Drogo, Jamie Lannister) fare so poorly in this universe, while the outcasts (bastards, dwarves, tomboys, cripples and book readers) find a way to survive.

Are you kidding me?
Real life doesn't even have Elves, Dwarves, Wizards & Magical Beasties.
(or spaceships, or new worlds, aliens, or dragons and so on)
Real life history is about as dry as hay.

For me - I have little energy to spend in memorizing the ongoing mistakes of human history.

You're thinking, "But knowing our history lets us learn from our mistakes - It's so important"
Me: I will never have any influence, nor do I want to have, on the direction humanity will take. Some people make policy, laws, go to war, sign treaties, make deals etc. Those are the people that should benefit from human historical facts. I'm just a guy who doesn't want any part of it. So loosing myself in fiction works just fine for me - It's a lot more interesting to explore in one's mind the creative possibilities of something than to just regurgitate the facts that actually happened.

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