u/Awkward_Possession42

I really hate this trend of starting discussions about veganism by immediately and needlessly ceding the moral high ground to vegans. “Of course, I know it’s evil”.

It’s gross pandering, it’s needless, it’s silly self-effacing behaviour and it undermines your own position to a ridiculous extent.

Sorry, if you really think eating meat is “evil” that’s an aggregated moral judgement that has already considered whatever carve-out you’re now going to describe and found you morally wanting.

There’s actually no need for it anyway. There are perfectly coherent arguments for meat-eating, perhaps not the worst forms of factory farming, but the actual act of eating a steak in principle is perfectly morally defensible.

It’s also just silly because how are you supposed to even discuss it with any merit or strength when you’ve already cowered to them and said “Ooh you’re just so much more moral than me!” - They’ve won before they’ve drawn a breath.

So, my message to you is to stop feeling the need to appease the kale-thumpers and actually have the spine and backbone to stand by your life decisions.

If you’re going to lecture me about why it is in fact immoral to eat meat, just realise how even commencing that conversation would have been a non-starter if I’d begun by saying “Ooh vegans are so moral!” and then you’ll see why the ceding is dumb.

You’re begging the moral question at the outset of a debate.

For context: Jason Arday is a former Cambridge professor who, at one time, was hailed as their youngest ever black professor.

Recently, word came out and investigations began about him plagiarising his PhD thesis (and other research), and lies about his background (struggles & successes, including raising money for charity and surviving cancer). During the course of his investigation, he resigned and (due to media backlash) he killed himself.

It is sad that he killed himself, of course. However, people in the UK are now trying to phrase this as some great crime of UK media.

Plagiarising your PhD and lying on your CV is basically the same as doping in sports, or rigging an election.

It is an unfair advantage. It is cheating. It is fraud.

Jobs at, even crappy, Universities in the UK are highly competitive - Let alone at Cambridge.

He robbed talented paying students at one of the world’s best Universities of a good education, he robbed other candidates of a prestigious jobs, he robbed other prospective PhD candidates of a spot on the course he took, he robbed his advisor and countless other academics he worked with and for of their time, and he did so much harm to Cambridge’s reputation.

Yes, it is sad he died. However, people in England are trying to act like reporting on it was some great crime by British media to report on him and they’re to blame for his death. No, he deserved to be shamed and we can’t let people off the hook for fraud, which is what this was, because of their mental health.

I take no pleasure in seeing him dead, that is true. However, he was an audacious con-man whose bad fortune was almost entirely self inflected.

NB: Influencers, reality TV stars, etc are actually just normal people who got lucky or got noticed.

But actors, sportspeople, musicians who’ve actually trained for it: no. They are not ‘just normal people’.

The argument that we should treat them with total agnosticism, the same shrug we’d give Karl who applied for a job as a producer at the radio station and got it, doesn’t hold up.

Yes, they bleed red. They brush their teeth. They take a shit in the morning like the rest of us (we all know this, we don’t need reminding of it every time someone achieves something). People aren’t genuinely of the opinion that Harry Styles is from another world - That was never the point.

The point is that most of them spent years, often from childhood, getting extraordinarily good at something the rest of us have collectively decided is worth billions of pounds and hours of our attention.

That’s not the same as doing fine at school and landing a job afterwards, which is what most of us did, myself included. There’s a difference between competent and exceptional, especially exceptional at something millions wish they could do and billions enjoy watching people do, and pretending there isn’t, just to keep everyone on the same moral footing, flattens something real.

So when a kid who’s obsessed with theatre looks up to someone who’s spent their whole life mastering exactly that, I don’t see the problem. That’s genuine admiration aimed at someone genuinely admirable.

I’m really into Chess, I’d feel the same about Magnus Carlsen, why? Because he’s super fucking talented at, super dedicated to, and super good at chess. That’s awesome! Why shouldn’t I admire him?

Obviously it can go too far, and get weird. Yes. I, personally, find the whole ‘celebrity hall pass’ thing disgusting.

However, there is a genuine difference between seeing Denzel Washington walk down a street and the town’s local crackhead walk down a street and it’s not an arbitrary or silly one.

Don’t shoot the messenger.

I’ve just seen a video saying Supergirl is projected to flop. Madame Web flopped. The Marvels flopped.

Hollywood seems to be fighting a losing battle when it comes to female-led superhero movies. Historically, men have made up a large share of the audience for the genre, and audiences often prefer protagonists they identify with.

So, many men are naturally more drawn to Superman or Batman than Supergirl or Batgirl. On the other hand, female-led superhero films haven’t consistently attracted enough additional female viewers to make up the difference. Studios keep trying to broaden the audience, and commercially it frankly isn’t working. There comes a time to cut your losses.

(^These are broad trends, not absolutes. Obviously I’m not saying that no men will ever watch a female protagonist, or that no women will ever watch a superhero film.)

On top of this, Hollywood seems to be completely unable to write good dialogue for female superheroes. The two films I’ve mentioned that are already out were corny. Again, don’t shoot the messenger - they were.

So you’re already fighting an uphill battle, and you’re fighting terribly. For as long as they’re unable to consistently make compelling female-led superhero movies, it’s best to just leave it. All that happens is that they erode goodwill for these films and make even the people who would otherwise go less likely to. So, in the event that they eventually get it right, we’ll all be so disillusioned that it’ll be an even worse uphill battle.

Or, at the very least, stop treating female-led superhero films as something that needs to be pushed out regularly regardless of whether there’s a strong story there.

Edit: Some good additional nuance, kindly provided by u/bobranaway :

Its not that they are female led… they are just bad movies that pander to a nonexistent audience. Like it or not… like you said the majority of the audience are male and you gotta go the ripley / sarah Conor route or the Stellar Blade route. The girlboss type leads are what flops over and over again but they are deadset on making it happen. Koreans seem to have cracked the female lead formula. Kill Boksoon and The Witch are great examples of well made female lead action/superpower movies with amazing female leads.

Edit: Broad data for people making “cherry-picking” accusations:

Highest grossing superhero films:
Captain Marvel at no.13. Wonder Woman is at no. 26. I’ll give you Ant Man & The Wasp at no. 49 as the co-titular character is a women. That’s three out of the top 50, where Wikipedia stops listing. And how many have we seen come out in the last few years?

Box office returns:

Women’s top 7: (Average 3.0x)

Captain Marvel (a smash hit in the women’s, mid in the men’s category)
6.5–7.4×

Wonder Woman
5.5×

Black Widow
1.9×

Birds of Prey
2.1–2.5×

Wonder Woman 1984
0.85×

The Marvels
0.75–0.94×

Madame Web
1.0–1.25×

Men’s top 7: (Average 8.5x)

Spider-Man: No Way Home
9.6×

Black Panther
6.8×

Aquaman
5.8–7.2x

Spider-Man: Far From Home
7.1×

Joker
15.4–19.6×

Spider-Man: Homecoming
5.0×

Thor: Ragnarok
4.8×

Side by side comparison:

Total budgets:
Men’s: ~$1.13–1.19bn
Women’s: ~$1.08–1.25bn

Total box office:
Men’s: ~$8.37bn
Women’s: ~$3.02bn

Average box office per film:
Men’s: ~$1.20bn
Women’s ~$431m

Billion-dollar films:
Men’s: 5
Women’s: 1

TLDR: Voldemort experiencing the severing of a connection/ absence of Harry in his mind was reason enough alone to think Harry was dead.

I’m currently watching a YouTube video about points where Voldemort could have won, and the video argues that getting Narcissa to check whether Harry was dead was a huge mistake.

Obviously there are plenty of reasons why Voldemort would have done it. Arrogance, not understanding love, underestimating other people, etc.

But the video also said, “Voldemort could have used Legilimency to check,” and that got me thinking: in a sense, maybe he did.

Not actively, necessarily. But it occurred to me that Voldemort had spent years experiencing this strange connection with Harry. We mostly see it from Harry’s perspective, but Voldemort was an accomplished Legilimens who could actively manipulate the connection, so it may well have been far more pronounced from his side than we ever see in the books.

If that’s true, then the disappearance of that connection may have been confirmation enough for him.

From Voldemort’s perspective, he had no idea Harry contained a Horcrux, which is the true reason for the connection. As far as he knew, he had just hit Harry with the Killing Curse and, for the first time in sixteen years, the constant tether between them had vanished. The only logical conclusion would be that Harry was dead.

In that sense, perhaps Voldemort did use a form of Legilimency to verify Harry’s death - not deliberately in that moment, but by relying on the apparent disappearance of the mental connection he had grown accustomed to.

This means getting Narcissa to check was, in itself, a seemingly redundant secondary safety-measure.

I was wondering whether this is an existing theory, whether canon explicitly contradicts it, or whether it might actually be a genuinely original idea?

Edit:

For pedants, here is a clean formulation of my argument:

P1: Voldemort is aware of the connection.
P2: We know Harry experiences it as emotions, visions, and thoughts.
P3: We are given very little information about Voldemort’s subjective experience of it. Other than that he can feel something, at least when Harry is looking in.
P4: Therefore it is reasonable to speculate that Voldemort experienced some analogous phenomenon to Harry’s.
C: If so, the disappearance of that phenomenon after the Killing Curse could have reinforced his belief that Harry was dead.

Edit 2:

I think I used the term ‘legilimancy’ poorly and thus lost clarity. I just mean some background, passive awareness (like hearing or another sense) of the connection that suddenly ceased. Not the active magic of legilimancy that we see Snape use, for instance.

Just thought I’d point out something I noticed on a rewatch. In loads of episodes the tan jackets that Mike wears are standard (and expensive) Carhartt jackets that they’ve obviously de-badged to make the look work without making him seem frivolous or to ruin the ‘struggling’ look.

You can tell because they have a residual square that looks less faded (probably due to treatment that happens in factory after the badge is put on).

I like to think Mike secretly treats himself to quality but doesn’t want Frankie or the kids to know because they wouldn’t understand that a $200 quality jacket is a good investment.

It feels very weird to me. I hadn’t heard about them at all, despite having semi-regularly seen skits by the guy who made Obsession (so I feel like I should have had it plugged to me before now) and now they seem to be all over my FYP.

I rarely see actual clips of them, or reviews - It’s all just hype about the directors, weird gags for promotion, and comparisons to Barbenheimer. I don’t know anyone IRL that has seen it nor had any friends mention it to me before my algorithm started plugging it a week ago (it feels a bit weird - organic trends don’t hit us all on the same day) and (again) it feels so out of the blue given that I hadn’t heard a word about them till recently.

There are plenty of reasonable explanations for this, sure.

That said, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it was fully just an industry planted phenomenon.

Yes, the Heck’s were not really “poor”.

They spent frivolously, put things on credit cards they never intended to pay off, ate takeout every dinner and genuinely were financial messes.

When they got money they would spend it on cable over bills, and cars, lip balms, and jeans over desperately needed home improvements.

They entered into a terrible credit card cycle, like many people did pre-2008, which would have been terribly hard to claw themselves out of.

Mike probably earned okay, Frankie a modest second income as someone often out of work and often selling nothing.

There were wage-slaves to their own credit card debt and extending frivolity.

I say all this as I keep seeing posts as if it’s new news that they weren’t literally flat broke.

Can we all just take this as accepted now and move onto some more interesting discussion?

discussion

I have seen many posts saying that people not liking the Odyssey is racist, it’s white-supremacy, and it’s all just butt-hurt people on the right. I have also seen consistent comparisons to so called “white-washing” of Jesus by Europeans and accusations due of hypocrisy due to this.

As a left-wing Christian who has read both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is disappointed by the casting, I disagree.

The “white-washing” of Jesus, is not white-washing. It is a documented phenomenon of artists portraying Jesus like themselves. If you go to Africa, Jesus is often portrayed as black. If you go to Europe, Jesus is often portrayed as white. Of course, we can make reasonable inferences that those are both inaccurate. However, for one - These are ubiquitous in all directions (black & white), and is done with the specific purpose of make Jesus feel personal and like oneself (the whole point of the incarnation).

Also, Jesus is not tied to his human race - He is the eternal and almighty God. His race was purely incidental. That said, I do find it gross when people assert that Jesus was “x race” for racist purposes. All of that said, I am and always would be very supportive of more accurate portrayals of Jesus - As would most Christians.

The reason for that the Odyssey casting disappoints me is because of what it suggests about the team’s dedication to historical accuracy. Yes, the books are fiction - But the races/ appearances etc. of the characters is very clear and intentional.

When adapting one of the formative texts of the modern world, and one of the greatest pieces of fiction of all time - I would expect higher reverence (the misrepresentations of Jesus are not a case of lack of reverence) for the works. It’s also indicative of their general attitude towards these seminal texts, and thus gives me reason to expect other creative decisions will lack reverence too.

That said, my disappointment is born out of my own wish that it would be accurate to the time, history, and texts, which is not something CN ever promised, so it isn’t really too fair of me to be mad that he’s not doing it like I want him to… which is why I’m not mad, just disappointed that it won’t be what I hoped it would be.

I’m also not in the habit of fictional stories getting me worked up to begin with, I have bigger things to get angry about.

This comes off the back of seeing a post about teachers, and the power they have to change students lives, which was shown through different TV and movie teachers. The top comment, which was liked by the poster, was this:

“Hate to be that person but I just find it disappointing how most films about inspiring teachers are men when teaching is a female dominated field by far.”

The implication is that, through some combination of sexism by screenwriters or producers or whoever, we reached this outcome and I just can’t stand it.

Maybe male teachers, by being a minority, are typically more standout. Maybe, it’s some mix of personality that means male teachers make more of an impact on the types of people who make movies. Maybe it’s pure luck. Maybe it’s because it’s very hard to portray close and genuine male - male relationships without them being sexualised.

Who knows? But why must it be malice?

The other thing is: How do we solve this? Less male teachers? Barring movies about male teachers? Gender swapping the stories made by those who were genuinely inspired by a male teacher? All contrived, unfair, perverse, and morally gross.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Not everything is someone out to get you.

Sometimes things just are.

Hi all, I’m wondering what I should do should this situation arise on my travels. Here is the hypothetical scenario:

You’re on an expedition through the Sahara Desert at night in a group of 21 and somehow you all get split up from one another. As you’re walking alone, you see a deep pit. It’s night time and you make out one man (Mr Perfectly-Honest) standing in there.

He calls out: “Please jump in! I need help, if 10 people jump in then we’ll be able to get out together.”

You ask: “Is there anyone else in there?”

He replies: “Well maybe, I can’t tell you otherwise this wouldn’t work as a thinly veiled point about the Red/ Blue button debate currently going viral online!”

You ask: “That’s fair! But, can’t I go find help?”

Him: “No, you’ll never find me again.”

You reply: “Okay, but why are you even in there? Did you fall?”

Him: “No, I jumped in completely voluntarily just in case somebody else in our group jumped in and needed me to make up the numbers!”

You reply: “But nobody needed to be in there in the first place?”

Him: “Well, maybe but I’m in here now and if you don’t join me then you’re basically killing me!”

You know there are 19 other guys who will all, for some contrived reason, eventually face this same dilemma and have to decide to jump or not jump.

If you leave him, he will starve to death unless 9 of the remaining 19 jump in too. If you join him, you will both starve to death unless 8 of the remaining 19 jump in too.

Do you jump in?