We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The farce is strong in this one! It would be hard to overstate how wonderful this is…
“There’s a lot of social problems with [Star Wars], rooted in casual racism, homophobia,” he claimed, before asserting: “Star Wars reeks of misogyny.” Darth Vader, the primary antagonist of the original George Lucas trilogy, came in for special criticism: “The main bad guy, what’s he called, Dark Raider. He’s all black. He listens to rap music. He’s just a real bad racial stereotype.”
Simply magnificent 😀
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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And Pizza the Hut encourages unhealthy, unsustainable, meat eating, ozone layer (remember the destruction of the ozone layer?) destroying, non local food produce. With environmentally destroying discardable packaging.
And it causes acid rain (remember that too? I get nostalgic about the non fashionable world destroying scares. But it was a simpler, more immediate sort of destruction we would undergo back then).
Godfrey Elfwick wins the internet for 2015-04-17.
How can they know so little?
Darth Vader (sorry “Dark Raider”) listening to “rap music”.
It is also insulting – Darth Vader is a murderer who works for the tyrant who rules most of the galaxy (far away and long ago), but he does not have bad taste.
And the bad guys use white storm troopers. Don’t jive me by saying that is armor on them, they are killers and they are white.
I’ve had a lot of success claiming some bizarre combination of BS races and sexualities, then accusing whoever disagrees with me of “X-phobia”. When they say “but you aren’t trans!” (or whatever) I go all caps and shriek “YOU DON’T GET TO LABEL MY SEXUALITY!” It’s pathetic how well it works.
The author is right: trolling is an art.
On this day in history Paul Revere rode a horse to a pinko city that German mercenaries were approaching to collect taxes to finance the war on the Injuns so the European settlers could steal their land?
Tarrou,
So long as chasing seagulls on a beach wearing a helicopter hat is acceptable it’s okay?
This, apparently, is not a parody (via David Thompson’s blog):
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=56678
Every so often I like to point out how racist the fantasy novels beloved of college students are: dwarves are industrious, elves are aloof, fairies are mental lightweights, and who ever heard of a good orc? The fact that the races being stereotyped are unreal is unimportant, since the racist stereotyping of them is real.
Much sport can be had from college students if you can keep a straight face.
KTWO, white storm troopers? I thought those were Krikkit warriors. That goes to show what I know about King Arthur in Space.
Tarrou, when some online leftist tries to “shame” me into silence by accusing me of being homophobic/transphobic, racist or sexist, I ask them, “what gender, sexual orientation and color am I?” That shuts them up.
And let’s not forget keeping princess Leia on a lead, because I never will.
Somehow I have the urge to rewrite the song Personal Jesus…
REACH OUT AND TOUCH SPACE!
Feeling alone when you are a clone
Pick up the receiver
I’ll make you a believer
…
I want to be in Godfrey Elfwick’s gang.
PersonFromPorlock
“Much sport can be had from college students if you can keep a straight face.”
You MAY have misspelled faculty.
Person from Porlock:
I started reading sci-fi when I was 10 or 12 years old, and dragged my poor mother to every terrible 50’s monster movie that came out until she finally just gave me a quarter and told me to go with my friends.
Star Wars was a revelation. I went with my oldest boy who was three. I don’t think either of us even moved, other than to eat our popcorn, for the whole picture. He was in tears when R2D2 was shot, and happy tears when it came out all fixed up at the end.
To this day, he collects Star Wars toys, and now shares them with his own son. I buy them for his birthday even now, and he’s in his forties, and he laughs and gets a nostalgic smile every time.
We have shared that marvelous moment together all these years.
As far as this article is concerned, if it was available to me on paper, I would save til the next time I visited that little room…
The question is – why did not the BBC see that it was a satire?
Are their private conversations so close to this, that it seemed normal to them?
Elfwick’s Twitter fee fee is great:
To be fair… high fantasy works by invoking the context of medieval legends, which did incorporate racial stereotypes. Tolkien stereotyped blond “Northmen” as fearless but lacking the deep wisdom of the Numenoreans. He also frequently described villainous Men as “squint-eyed” or “swarthy”. The inborn superiority of Elves (including the superiority of some Elf kindreds to others) and the inborn evil character of Orcs echoes real-world racism.
Incidentally, racial stereotyping is commonplace in the legends of pretty much all cultures. The “Thousand and One Nights” is riddled with it.
Paul Marks: “Are their private conversations so close to this, that it seemed normal to them?”
Yes. It shouldn’t be underestimated just how ignorant these self-regarding elitists are about everyone who is outside of their tribe.
See this article, also from Breitbart, for another example: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/04/16/hooray-for-that-much-maligned-class-of-brit-the-white-working-class-bloke/
Hmph. At this point, I can only say that racism is in the eye of the beholder.
If you’re a writer of fiction you have to (well almost have to) give at least SOME of your characters SOME physical description.
And physical variety and similarity amongst humans being ubiquitous, there is no physical characteristic I can think of that you can hang on a character that can’t be interpreted as racism (not to mention “sexism,” or “ageism,” or-for-gawd’s-sake “speciesism”!) by anyone who keeps an eye peeled for it. Which far too many people do, as that unfortunate habit has been so frequently and vocally exercised in arsisiety that it’s nearly second-nature. It’s one of the chief lenses through which we’ve learned to examine the world.
Rumpelstiltskin is a racist character, and so is Rapunzel, and so is effin Moby Dick! –And if he’s not racist, he’s certainly sexist (twice: he’s a “he,” and all “he’s” are sexist, and he’s sexist as a creature of Melville’s imagination, as Melville has given him a MALE name; and obviously he’s speciesist. (So is Capt. Ahab, come to that.)
And by the way, “swarthy” can apply to anybody, including my own fair-skinned daughter of England and Castile when deeply tanned, which used to occur every summer. “Neo-con” is code for “Jew,” or for “war-monger,” only in the minds of some. And “Swarthy” is code for — what, Southern Greek or Italian, anyone from the area of the Med, Arabs, Jews (not bloody likely from the Professor!!!), somebody with a Negro ancestor — only in the minds of some.
“And by the way, “swarthy” can apply to anybody, including my own fair-skinned self when deeply tanned, daughter of England and Castile that I am.” :>(
My ear revolts at you describing you daughter as “swarthy”, Julia. Dark skinned women are “sultry”.
“daughter of England and Castile”
But that means you’re only an infanta! So no more listening to you Julie! 😉 The BBC radio is broadcasting a eadio adaptation of Ursula K Le Guin’s “Left Hand of Darkness”. Planning on listening to it because I loved the book*. No spoilers sweetie but it does deal in gender and racial/species issues. It has been ceased on as a feminist tome. Nah but it is also a gripping yarn and also has vastly more back-story than the average SF.
*Genly Ai seems to give a bye to a Stalinist state but he is trained as a sort of diplomat. Put it this way… A serious suggestion that it is lesbian/feminist is that the equivalent of a pager in it is called an “ansible” which is an anagram of “lesbian”. This ignores simple things like the equivalent of the Federation is called the Ekumen.
I do beg your pardon. Julie.
Nick: Castile. The Castilians consider themselves elites (or at least some of them used to) because they had (they claimed) no Moorish blood. None of this Berber/barbarian/Moroccan/North-African/etc. nonsense. (That’s as my dad used to tell the story. Which would be how he got it from his folks. Further deponent sayeth not.)
My grandfather’s family came from Castile, then, but I have no idea whether it was his father or his great-great-great-great-grand. Anyway, his branch of the family had a plantation in British Honduras. Later they emigrated to America, and became citizens here. Don’t worry, I’m eligible for the Presidency: both parents American citizens long before I was born, which was in Massachusetts. Definitely American soil.
But the Spaniards mostly tan rather than burning, so “swarthy.”
Alas, no infanta-ship for me. And I used to think it would be so cool! I mean, one would get to wear a tiara. (I thoroughly enjoyed coloring in my Coronation coloring books, which appeared a year or so prior to HM’s becoming HM. And I read every word of The Little Princesses.)
If Miss LeGuin or anybody else wishes specifically to write an allegory, or a story using real history as a springboard, that’s another matter entirely. Personally I much prefer the Professor to Miss LeGuin, however. :>)
. . .
RlJ, LOL!! I like to think that a few years ago (for a rather large value of “few”) I could have been described as “sultry,” but alas, in honesty I don’t really think it was ever applicable … still, if the label’s available, I’ll take it! My daughter’s 1/4 German, 1/4 Jewish-Hungarian, 1/8 Spanish, 3/8 Anglo-Saxon, and that’s all anybody will admit to, so … a genuine American Mutt. Not at all sultry, I’m afraid.
I generally describe my African-American wife as “dark but comely” or “thoroughly brunette.” And she’s much more sunny than sultry.
I recall there was some annoyance that the main baddie in Serenity, the film based on the Firefly TV series, was black. The fact that one of the heroines was black (as well as being unbelievably hot) was, needless to say, overlooked.
Roue,
“Sultry: Oppressivley hot and close or moist; sweltering, a sunny day.”
I have yet to meet an oppressively hot woman, lol.
(Satire alert).
Julie, I agree that “swarthy” doesn’t really apply to race, or even the national variety. I lived in Thailand for some time, and while the locals don’t care for dark skin, I’m partial to it when it comes to women that catch my eye. There’s no genetic or racial difference between the pale-as-a-Japanese Thai and a Thai that’s truly dark. They don’t consider light v dark a race thing, but rather as an indicator of caste and wealth. (Poor people are far more likely to have to be uneducated and work in the brutal South East Asian sun). They also discriminate based on dialect. (Poor people from the “Issan” region are often (a) darker and (b) speak a Thai-Lao creole brogue.) Ironically, like most South East Asian people, the Thai’s give difference to wealth, and an attractive “bar girl” can earn as much in a year as a Thai professional airline pilot, so the Thai’s have a love-hate relationship with “bar girls” from the Issan region.
Roue,
Sultry women are “smoking hot”, but not necessarily burnt crip, lol. That is, hot but not necessarily dark or even brown. Beleve you me, I’ve met quite a few Latin American women who were sultry but not brown in the slightest.
PapayaSF, I love all those hillarious comments, especially the trans-woman one. It’s slightly more subtle.
Thanks! I really did write “fee fee,” didn’t I? LOL. Just “feed,” of course.
My four-year-old son is currently interested in (Lego) Lord of the Rings (black riders) and Star Wars (Darth Vader is just another black rider to him). I’m waiting to be called into the school to explain why he thinks “black” people are baddies…