u/Pemulis_DMZ

This is another time where the Left will go nuts, absolutely losing their mind over a trial and screaming for blood, only for it to not be nearly as cut and dry as they try and make it seem

And when the actual facts come out - like her sworn testimony admitting it was consensual - it will make them look deluded at best or fucking retarded at worst.

At which point they’ll stick their heads in the sand and continue to mock the innocent party they tried to burn at the stake.

Or they’ll just pretend it never happened.

The last thing they’ll ever do is self reflect. Because the Mob never learns.

His mom came and popped him out on US soil for the rights and privileges, then spirited him back to to their native Turkish Muslim culture. Dude comes back spewing his anti-American, anti-capitalist bullshit while playing dress-up and living the California good life that only this country could give him. He needs to pack his keffiyeh and take his revolutionary cosplay-self back to Turkey.

They cannot tolerate dissent. They can’t even tolerate silence re their newest causes - it’s “deafening” to them.

They demand the wider culture adopt their political posturing and fucking lose it when that doesn’t happen. They politicize everything and then accuse those who don’t go along with it as being the reason people are upset.

Most people either don’t give a shit what someone like Ed Shereen has to say about anything or they just want to listen to him sing his songs. They see people on the Left losing their mind over him having the audacity to not shout “Free Palestine” and guess what? They walk away less likely to care about that issue at all bc they recognize mental illness when they see it.

For one, people who are nice and accepting generally don't feel the need to put a big sign up proclaiming their virtue to strangers who happen to be driving by. They just kind of go about their lives being nice, accepting people.

Secondly, there seems to be a strong correlation between how "progressive" someone's views are and just how intollerant and yes, hateful, that person is of anyone who disagrees with them. This recent peer-reviewed study showing conservatives are generally more empathetic than liberals toward people who disagree with them comes to mind.

They should really change their signs to something like "Hate has no home here unless you voted for the other guy in which case please stop by so I can scream the word 'Nazi' at you".

The Sopronas does flashbacks but not like this scene. Tony's flashbacks are usually long stories that give the full context to a time in his life, and the significance of that time is, if misunderstood, at least recognized by Tony.

But when Tony thinks about the first time he murdered someone - shooting a man named Willie Overall - we only see the briefest flashback, maybe a few seconds. He only thinks of it because Paulie brings it up. And he has nothing to say about it.

We see a terrified, crying, bloody man, lying on the ground, hold up his hand in a futile attempt to shield himself from the inevitable.

What we're shown in that scene is the moment of Tony's greatest trauma, the moment there was no turning back from the path his evil father led him down.

After burying that moment down deep and never thinking about it, it became a matter of old habit for Tony to never really examine the terrible things he does or what his actions are doing to him and those around him.

There's really no other scene in the show like it, and it's over in a flash. But in it is the origin of Tony's whole life. It also foreshadows how Tony would meet his end. At least Willie Overall saw it coming.

When Chrissy clearly didn't see the seriousness of his promotion to acting capo, Sil communicated that perfectly by stone facing Chrissy’s joke about getting wings like Paulie.

He indulged in his vices without going crazy or losing all sense of control like Ralphi or Tony.

Crew members like that fucking parakeet Albert Barese knew they could come to Sil with legitimate concerns and that Sil wouldn't bullshit them.

He was the only guy who knew how to tell Tony what he didn't want to hear, even if Tony usually refused to listen to him anyways.

He always gave good guidance, didn’t talk shit, saw people’s motivations for what they were, and knew who he was and owned it.

He didn’t go to hell. He’s a soldier. Soldiers don’t go to hell.

If the land is stolen that would mean that "original" settlers had borders and laws. So if you think the land is stolen, that means you believe illegal immigration is wrong.

So either the original settlers were racial supremacist bigots for not welcoming the new settlers, or the current citizens are right for trying to control borders and immigration.

It gets especially stupid when you factor in there isn’t a single country on earth without a history of population displacement.

That jobs figure comes from the Wall Street Journal.

For many years, DEI regime has ruled. A lot of companies had gender and/or race targets. The NASDAQ, which includes more than 3,000 major companies, had rules requiring its listees to publicly disclose diversity statistics and to have at least two directors who are minorities, including women.

This forced diversity meant women were privileged in upper-level hiring and promotions.

I've seen this in my industry, as every organization promoted anyone but a white man to their senior leadership roles over the past ten years. Among companies that do have DEI programs, 61% reported prioritizing diversity over qualifications, 35% of hiring managers say reverse discrimination does occur, and 10% say they straight up avoid hiring white men in general.

People have noticed that DEI is discriminatory. Democrats should own up to this if they want to win the white male vote back.

If it had just been about the money, I think he would have taken a lot more. He could have demanded anything. After all, what were they gonna do about it, and what's a G-note to a guy like Furio?

Furio was from the old school. He saw right away that Chip & Dale were a couple of kids with a lot to learn in a cutthroat world and tried to teach them they needed to have the money ready (in an envelope) and to look out for their themselves.

Hence the smirk. He knew these two were clowns and that yeah, he could profit from it, but it reminds me much more of a guy laughing at a couple of rookies making dumb mistakes than a bully seeing an easy target.

It was basically the mafia version of giving a new employee a tough time because you think they could benefit from a little toughening up.

It’s a real shame they were too busy sucking each others’ cocks to take in the lesson.

I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation.

Age may, and often does, weaken obstinacy, by the revelation, at seventy-odd years, that most human things do not matter.
— Bolitho

In Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel, Futility, a superliner on her maiden transatlantic voyage strikes an iceberg and sinks, with all but 13 on board drowned. His fictional ship is named the Titan. Pulling out of the harbor, she strikes and sinks a smaller ship — just as the Titanic did 14 years later.

In Nevil Shute’s 1948 novel, No Highway, flights of the transformational Reindeer airliner keep crashing. No one can determine the cause. Then an eccentric boffin, Dr. Scott, suggests a brand-new theory: Metal fatigue at the subatomic level causes the tailplane to separate. Everyone thinks he’s nuts, until his theory is proved and he is exonerated. In ’48, metal fatigue was a novelistic device invented by Shute. Three years after the book’s publication, de Havilland started flying the world’s first commercial jetliner, the Comet. And they began falling out of the sky. Three went down for no apparent reason. Pilot error, sabotage, bad fuel, and so on were all suggested and disproved. All Comets were grounded and tested until a major design flaw was discovered. There were cracks in the fuselage brought on by a previously unsuspected phenomenon: metal fatigue.

Twenty years ago, a hard-hitting American wrote a play called November. On Broadway, Nathan Lane played its protagonist, a gormless American president up for reelection. He stands no chance, as “his numbers are lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol.” Furthermore, he has no money. An aide informs him that he can go home with the $50,000 that Big Turkey annually awards the president for pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving.

He says, hell, he’ll take the money. The aide continues: By the way, this year the turkey folks want a pardon for two turkeys — the head and an alternate, “just in case.” The prez says, at $50K per, that’s $100,000. The turkey guy shows up and is told the price of pardons just went up. He refuses to pay, calls the president various types of loser, and says the price is $50K — take it or leave it.

The prez, now insulted, strikes back. He asks his aide if he actually has the power to pardon turkeys. He is informed that he does. “In that case,” he tells the turkey guy, “I want $200,000,000 on my desk by breakfast, or I’m going to pardon every f***ing turkey in this country.” End of Act One.

Act Two begins, and the aide says yes, you can pardon all the turkeys, but Americans will still eat them. The prez assigns his genius speechwriter, Bernstein, to explain to the electorate why they must not eat turkey.

She puts on her thinking cap and extemporizes that they must not celebrate Thanksgiving at all — that it celebrates patriarchy, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and conspicuous consumption — all combined under the auspices of a seemingly nongovernmental holiday that is, in essence, a hymn to the Power of the State.

Does this sound familiar?

* * *

My beloved Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, noted that the truism “an artist sees the future” is incorrect: An artist sees the present.

And consider Second Sight. The Gaels and the Celts believe the ability to see a troubling future to be a burden — it can’t be summoned or propitiated, and it only and always announces tragedy and induces despair in the soothsayer. We know also of Cassandra, who had the power to predict the future, but whose predictions were always mocked.

* * *

With the academic repurposing of History as a series of abuses and their indictment, it is now difficult even to predict the past. In 1905, George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the Past are condemned to repeat it.” After a long life, I must add: “as are those who can remember it.”

For only those old enough to have lived through history can actually understand it. I don’t mean that one need have suffered this or that historic calamity, reversal, or outrage to understand it, but that age and intelligence — reasonably free of prejudice — can conclude in a way that youth cannot that, perhaps, “History” is valuable as it has taught us the following:

(1) As Rebecca West maintained, governments are the most powerful entity; and

(2) The Great Man theory is absurd, as Leo Tolstoy wrote. The peasant sees the smoke before he sees the locomotive and concludes the first causes the second; and five million Frenchmen did not march on Moscow because some gent from Corsica told them to.

Yes, history will repeat itself — what else does it have to do?

The no-good brother-in-law, once lent money, will always come back for more; a Western world in upheaval will reliably savage the Jews; and communism, promulgated by the intellectually arrogant, will always appeal to the bored wealthy. They will use their money to inform their pets, the working class, of its grievances, and ride the wave to their moment of hegemony, when observant thugs will liquidate them.

There are only so many ways in which something can go wrong, and even a complete awareness of them (and who could have such) doesn’t give one the power either to avoid catastrophe or to convince others of its imminent arrival. Like Cassandra, the Aged Observer will prognosticate only to be disbelieved, for the world has moved on, and his very inclination to convince has waned, with an ever-increasing conviction of debate’s futility. We age and die, and a populace (i.e., ours) doesn’t change because people change but because they die.

Those who suffered real trauma in childhood will inevitably age with a warped notion of the world and its interactions. Reciprocally, the young, educated to a delusional understanding of these interactions, must mature into some psychic trauma: viewing a world whose observable truths are in conflict with the ineluctable understandings of their childhood.

My father was an immigrant kid, raised by a single mom during the Depression. He often chided me for various thoughtless behaviors, through stories of his early poverty. But however moving they might have been, they were only stories.

This is a time of terrifying change — I will amend that, a time of change terrifying to the old, and particularly so to those of us who have grown past a strength sufficient for both the challenges of action and the analgesic of outrage.

A contemporary remarked that, perhaps, “the pendulum will swing back,” and that reason, courtesy, and patriotism will reemerge. But he was wrong. For he could only imagine their reemergence in those (our contemporaries) who understood these attributes as essential for a functional and prosperous society.

But to the young, the American Century is a disgrace, and the American Dream a shuck. Histories may be debated, but the irreducible core must be verifiable fact, and what if Fact is determined only by Big Brother?

I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation. I can’t even describe the current form other than as a civilization split into two factions, one decrying and the other exploiting chaos. I don’t know if prophecy as prediction actually exists; but I know, like Cassandra, that if so, it will do so in no useful form. I don’t know if the sun can actually supply enough power to run our cities, but I know there is nothing new beneath it.

"In Camelot" is the closest Tony ever comes to really facing up to who his father was and just how facile his conception of This Thing of Ours was.

When Fran Felstein does her song and dance, for just a few seconds, Tony sees who Fran really is: not some glamorous, classy woman, but a self-absorbed and shallow person who's entire sense of self-worth derived from "wooing" men like Tony and his father.

He sees more than just that, though, in that brief moment of clarity. He see all the lies that go along with it. His father was a terrible person. All the things they tell themselves about honor and family are bullshit. The life he’s living is as shallow and ugly as the woman in front of him.

Tony comes so close to finally acknowledging these lies, the lies he on some level has always been aware of. It's this underlying awareness that occasionally rises up to just beneath his consciousness, leading to panic attacks. Instead of accepting this during his therapy sessions after meeting Fran, he repeats the lies and continues to blame everything on his mother. To do otherwise, to acknoweldge the lies and their implications, would require real work. And we all know Tony doesn't do actual self-improvement.

The episode ends with him at the Bing not only repeating the lies but embellishing them to comfort himself after such a close brush with reality. He embelishes to such absurd degrees - She was a princess. For a minute there, JFK’s marriage was almost over. - even his cronies can barely keep a straight face.

You should cringe at Fran singing Happy Birthday, Mr President. Cringe, but don’t look away like Tony did.

Being nice to criminals doesn’t reduce crime. Lowering test standards doesn’t make kids learn better. Providing free needles doesn’t make drug use safer. Tolerating homelessness is not humane.

These policy failures become most acute at the local level. Municipal governments should make things run well, not save the world.

Even if you haven't seen Gladiator 2, you've likely heard that there's a scene involving a naval battle in the coloseum. Not content to just feature large naval ships, Scott added CGI sharks in the water.

I highly doubt that someone with Scott's resume doesn't understand that adding those CGI sharks isn't just unrealistic - how did they transport them there, how is the water so clear, this is salt water?! - it also doesn't actually heighten the tension in any way.

He could have just shown murky brown water and a quick scene before the fight showing all the gladiators being made to wear heavy armor. We would have understood: you fall out of the boat, you're dead.

But instead Scott jumps the shark.

Why?

I think it's clear that at this point Ridley Scott takes great pride in being able to get big budget films done in time. At a time when anything outside superhero movies has a hard time getting such funding, Scott has still been able to get nine-figure funding for several projects.

He's not a filmmaker. He's a project manager. And I don't say this necessarily as an insult. He looks to employ as many people as possible. CGI sharks probably meant another $500K or somethign like that, some more people on staff, and another task on the project management checklist, so why not?

That's how Scott approaches his movies these days, as a set list of deliverables, and the more deliverables, the more people he can get paid and the more impressive it is that he gets it done on time. Criticisms of the merits of his storytelling feel totally besides the point at this point.