Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to recordari,
And? The fact that 'Hollywood' panders to the 'American popular psyche' is of no great surprise, or particularly newsworthy, is it?
No, it is not. The good thing about Hollywood movies however is that generally I don't pay to make them. And I'm not one for considering the peddling of such ideologies irrelevant, much as I agree that it's been going on for a while longer than Jackson has been directing.
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Yes, that seems reasonable.
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The only bad humans are of Middle Eastern stock, just as the men of the West invade the Gulf? I don't know, you tell me.
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Hah!
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But if you're right, then surely that undermines a major part of the rationale for subsidising this particular industry so heavily - which is why I brought it up. I think the claims that The Hobbit willl be good for tourism are very optimistic.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Some judges may be more authoritarian than others, certainly.
And perhaps the best chance for success of a botched police case is to find or chance upon one of those.
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The "men of the west" part of Aragorn's speech in the Return of the King was not in Tolkien, as I understand it, and the Arab pirates were... something else, really. It was either grotesquely tone deaf to history, or blithely casual with its racial politics. Or both.
The point of the digitally removed Maori is not that evil Peter Jackson does it, is that it's how we are happy to be branding ourselves for the sake of the tourist dollar, to the point of subsidising a whole industry. Because it's good for us. And hey, it might be, in the short term, I'm sure the moteliers and the guy who sells trips to Hobbiton aren't complaining. But I think people are going to tire of it in a big way - simply because it isn't real.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Even if this shooting isn't related to that, the chances that someone else will be driven to violence because they hear repeatedly that it's acceptable and even commendable to deal with your differences by shooting people are too high to risk.
A tea party organiser was saying the same thing - sorry I lost the link - in an interview post shooting. While he had no problem with the rhetoric at the beginning, he gradually started to realise meeting after meeting that there were people on the fringe who seemed to take it too literally, and began to tone it down. Which is nothing if not an admission that in the real world of causes and consequences there was in fact something deeply wrong with the rhetoric.
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Matthew, you're the one who introduced the word conspiracy as a pejorative for anyone who'd dare to express doubts about the potential fairness of a judge-only trial.
Yes, one thing is being in on a full-blown conspiracy - another being more easily persuaded than twelve people off the street of how a convinction in this particular case might be opportune for the maintenance of an orderly society. A judge could conceivable exhibit an authoritarian bias of the kind that is more easily diluted in a jury - which surely is one of the points of having jury trials, and why there is at least a perception that not getting one in such a case may be limiting of one's rights to due process. The circumstances having been suppressed, and in light of what Graeme has said, one would hate to jump to any sort of conclusion either way, but it's certainly how the news was received, no?
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Jesus fuck, is Armond "District 9 proves Peter Jackson is a racist" White moonlighting for The Onion?
I think one could probably build a pretty good case based on Return of the King alone, but congratulations on missing this particular point. You owe me a fluffy bear.