TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu


  1. 43 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

    The jibe about "people that agree with you" was ill-judged. Sorry about that. Since it wasn't clear, I'll come out and say it - I think the show gets a lot of shit becuase it doesn't stick to the progressive party line. So SP doesn't come down on one side when folks feel it should. It's not a show that is going to agree with you and tell you, "you're right" unless you're a nihilist.

    I think the issue is not that South Park fails to say the right thing but rather that it says the wrong thing. Nobody goes after cooking shows for failing to "stick to the progressive party line," because cooking shows aren't taking on these sorts of topics in the first place. But if South Park wants to explicitly address contemporary political issues, obviously people are going to attack it for getting the wrong answers. If the right answers are the progressive party line, then trivially, South Park will be attacked for not sticking to the progressive party line. But it's being attacked because it gets the wrong answers! Surely there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's not like South Park has to keep injecting itself into the conversation about all of these hot button political issues.

     

    43 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

    In spite of that, I've never felt that South Park is telling me to be afraid of having an opinion. Sure, they're mocking you sometimes, but so what? It's a show full of fart jokes, not a political pamphlet. If anything has made me afraid of holding an opinion, it's social media (SCREAM AT EACH OTHER IN 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS), but that's a topic for another day. Do you think SP's approach to issues has a chilling effect on people wanting to voice their views?

    I am not sure exactly what this is a response to. I do not see anyone in this thread arguing that South Park is telling you to be afraid of having an opinion. (Perhaps you misread me when I said "afraid" above - I just meant that the wrong opinion is something one should be afraid to hold, because one ought not to hold wrong opinions. I didn't literally mean South Park is scaring people.) I see people in this thread arguing that South Park is advancing objectionable political messages. I don't know or particularly care whether South Park has a chilling effect on people who want to voice their views. I merely care whether South Park's views are objectionable or not. It seems to me that they are, which is particularly unfortunate given how popular and influential South Park is. But even if it were a show nobody watched, I'd still think its views were objectionable.


  2. 6 hours ago, Beasteh said:

    Don't agree with the notion that those on the "right" side (i.e. people you agree with) should be immune to mockery.

    We're never going to get anywhere if you equate "right" with "people you agree with." If there isn't any such thing as right vs. wrong, and everyone is equally right and equally wrong, and it just comes down to whomever you happen to disagree with, then nobody is going to have any good reason to get up in arms about South Park. The issue only arises if there are actually correct answers about the sorts of topics the show addresses. Are you willing to back down from your frankly insane stance that there's no such thing as right or wrong beyond "what you agree with" when it comes to the topics the show discusses? If not, there's no reason to have any conversation at all. People will simply agree with what they agree with and nobody will have any cause for calling anyone out.

     

    And I am not sure anyone has been saying that the right side should be "immune to mockery." I think people have been saying that the show ought not to draw a false equivalence between the right side and the wrong side. Surely one can mock the right side without presenting it as equivalent to the wrong side. The issue with South Park, I take it, is that it typically does present the sides as basically equal, at least in the sense of everyone being shitty and dumb and the only cool thing is to be above it all, as if "above it all" weren't actually a very specific ideological position that you can only occupy if you have a certain very specific view of things that the show fails to acknowledge as being something other than neutral. And of course it isn't neutral: it's just as partisan as any of the sides the show attacks. It just cloaks its partisanship in a guise of neutrality.

     

    6 hours ago, Beasteh said:

    Randy is trying to use progressive politics to get status, it's his MO for the last few seasons. I laugh when it goes wrong for him. No equivalence is being drawn between progressives and bigots in the cited episode - the opposition to Randy's crusade is just a bunch of kids who want the day off.

    It's not just  a bunch of kids who want the day off. If I want something and in pursuit of that thing I cozy up to bigots, I'm doing something wrong, not in virtue of wanting the thing, but in virtue of cozying up to the bigots. Why? Bigotry is wrong! This is not rocket science. Bigotry is wrong. Say it with me. It is not hard to accept this. You don't need to be afraid to say it (even if South Park suggests that you ought to be afraid).


  3. Yeah, I think it's letting South Park off the hook to say "ah well it's only going after the hypocrites." Everyone can agree that the hypocrites are doing something bad. That's not an interesting take. The point is that South Park turns all the leftists into hypocrites so that they can criticize them just as much as they criticize the people with actually shitty views. But that's a cheap move. It creates a false equivalence between the people with the right views (whom the show still gets to beat up, because it turns them all into hateful hypocrites when you get down to how they actually act) and the people with the wrong views (who are wrong, obviously). Making fun of everybody only makes sense if everyone equally deserves making fun of. But not everyone deserves equally making fun of. The wrong people deserve making fun of. The right people don't.


  4. The tomato meter isn't comparable to Letterboxd, because it's just a percentage of reviews that were positive. If you want to compare the tomatometer to Letterboxd you have to decide what star rating counts as "positive" and then figure out which percentage of ratings are at or above that.


  5. I'm a little unsure how the author thought "Avengers" rhymed with "scavengers," given it's a real word, but whatever. I think her thoughts on the film pretty much line up with mine: the main way to enjoy it is by liking the characters, rather than getting all tied up with the plot or whatever's been going on for 18 movies and so on. I think people who are like "you gotta see all the movies beforehand to know what's going on" are looking to get something different out of the movie than me, and certainly something different out of the movie than what she got.


  6. 5 hours ago, jennegatron said:

     

    I don't think you need to have seen either of those movies follow Infinity war. Basically the only things of consequence are that Thor found the Hulk & lost an eye in Ragnarok. Black Panther is the leader of Wakanda, a secret African nation that has recently opened itself up to the outside world. If you liked Civil War, go see Infinity War imo

    I think you can pick up the eye thing via context clues. The Hulk thing too. And the Black Panther stuff. I mean Thor has an eye patch in the movie, you don't exactly need to watch Thor Ragnarok to learn that it's covering up a missing eye!

     

    I do think Ragnarok and Black Panther are the second and third best Marvel movies, though, and I like basically all these movies, so they're certainly worth seeing at some point.


  7. 6 hours ago, Saltimbanco said:

    Hm?

     

    From your signature, is this an "objective reviews" thing? If anything, I want a more subjective review, from a reviewer whose tastes align with my own, that might better reflect my own personal experience, and I'm bemoaning how hard that is to find, particularly when reviewers in attempting to sound more objective and impartial don't elaborate on their own personal tastes much, or put those tastes in a larger context, as a frame of reference.

    No, it's a quote from the game.


  8. I've pretty much given up hope for book 3 after book 2 and after meditating on stuff a bit, but back when I read book 1 my assumption and my hope was that by the end of book 3 it would become clear that Kvothe is either lying or at least selectively reporting like 70% of the story, and the 30% that's true is all about how terribly he fucked everything up, and how everything is now awful forever and it's all a shitshow. The evil tree and the framing narrative still leave this possibility open, so chances are book 3's gonna clinch it all, but I've become more and more convinced over time that Rothfuss is on Kvothe's side in all this, which, if true, means that there's no way it'll wrap up by demonstrating that he's been a huuuuuge shitheel all along.


  9. 44 minutes ago, Ben X said:

    That is the first (and likely last) Steamed Hams video I have ever watched. I enjoyed it and yet can only imagine it's utterly dull as an ongoing meme.

    I'm going to resist the temptation to turn this into a steamed hams meme thread, but I'll note that I've found many of them pretty enjoyable. There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into some of the videos.


  10. 11 hours ago, clyde said:

    This article was educational for me. It seems that there is debate among muslims about whether or not halal-certification is bending too much in order to allow for industrial meat-production. 

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/18/halal-food-uk-ethical-organic-safe

    But I guess this means that the living-conditions (tayyib) is not currently being enforced.

    This site appears to be speaking of the schism.

    https://www.animalsinislam.com/islam-animal-rights/bismillah/

    Right, there are basically always schisms on religious topics like this, so it's not like it's 100% clear cut (so it's relatively different from the way halal meat is produced, which is a 100% clear cut right across the jugular, sometimes without stunning the animal first, which is not a thrilling way to die). But the general idea is that you can't just buy halal meat and assume you're doing anything helpful from an animal rights perspective. There's probably a better chance you're doing something that's positively worse, and the most likely possibility is that you're doing something which is no different from the status quo. And because the status quo includes continual torture up until death for most animals, one might reasonably take issue with the status quo and on that basis refrain from purchasing meat.


  11. 6 minutes ago, clyde said:

    To be honest, it was just some Youtube video that seemed like a person with progressive-politics trying to combat a particular strain of islamophobia.

    Not the best source of information. I'll look into it more.

    Unfortunately, although it sounds like that person has great intentions, it could be that they're just parroting some nonsense they heard one time. The only slaughter rules that I know much about, which are kosher and halal, tend to be at best a wash, and at worst they lead to a lot of agony for the animals that get slaughtered.


  12. 23 hours ago, clyde said:

    I also recently found out that part of halal is providing good lives for the animals and what islam considers compassionate slaughter. It's made me consider getting it when I do eat meat.

    Can you say more about where you heard this? My impression is that the main requirement for halal meat is that the animal be slaughtered by cutting its throat, and because there's no requirement that it be stunned first, many animals die extremely painful deaths. I've never heard of anything about providing good lives for animals.


  13. 5 hours ago, MuntyG said:

    nope, but if you are a vegetarian then it's your choice

    I might be alone in this, but I think it's a little rude to show up in a thread that's explicitly an ongoing conversation (i.e. this is not a "show off  your latest work" thread or a "post funny pictures" thread or whatever) and just ignore everything so that you can write your own opinion. We've covered this sort of thing already, and if you're not interested in engaging with the conversation, it's not clear what business you have posting in the thread in the first place. If you just want to drop knowledge bombs on the rest of us and who gives a fuck what we've got to say, perhaps you could start a new thread with your pronouncements rather than bumping an old one for no reason.