And you made the error of putting British and French colonialism in the 1950s on the same level as the Holocaust, which is offensive to Holocaust victims. Hence the need for nuance.
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I didn’t say it was “on the same level” (whatever way you choose to judge these things - body count? number of Hollywood movies made? Size of the monuments?), I’m just saying both evils are way past the nuance horizon.
Who are *you *to get to say “your suffering has no shades of grey, but yours, does”? You’re neither a Holocaust victim nor a victim of African colonialism.
And you’re the only one putting a strict “in the 50s” and “Only England and France” delimiter on the whole discussion. When I talk about colonialism in Africa as an unmitigated evil, I’m talking about all of it, and *all *of it’s effects. Congo Free State, Herero Genocide, Rwandan genocide and lots more. Rhodesia and Madagascar are part of a whole, just like it wasn’t just Germans killing Jews in the Holocaust.
If any actual Holocaust victims feel the comparison is personally offensive to them, they’re welcome to let me know, and I’ll hear them out. Your self-serving attempt to limit the scope of evil to score a debate point, not so much.
Jesus, are you guys still talking about how European colonialism of Africa might or might not have been so bad? Because the case is pretty definitively on the side of ”Bad…very, very bad…like, Hitler and Stalin bad.”.
Can’t we drop this pointlessly wrong diversion and just get back to the cussing and insulting?
Stranger
I had an inkling the link was going to be King Leopold II before I even clicked on it.
It isn’t nearly justice but at least the fucker died insane of syphilis.
That’s not fair. He’s got skin in the game. When he was a kid, he rode a choo choo train in Kenya and liked it.
What about your self-serving attempt to score a debate point by insisting there be no limitation on historical scope when evaluating a country and its government? That strikes me as highly dubious, and I very much doubt you would stick to this principle if we were discussing a country you admire in the present day or in recent history.
Bernie Sanders likes to talk about how we should be more like Denmark. That country, it so happens, is the world’s oldest monarchy. The current queen, Margrethe II, is a direct descendant of King Harald Bluetooth, who (per Wiki) assassinated the king of Norway and “forced [Norwegians] into subjugation” in the tenth century. Is that really the kind of government we want to emulate, Bernie?
Now, as long as we’re in the Pit, let me throw another coal (or three) on the fire. How come people freak when a character from comics is “whitewashed” (and imagine the furor if Okoye had been played by Reese Witherspoon), but no one bats an eye at Valkyrie being played by a black actor? I wanted a blue-eyed blonde with braids, dammit!
You mean pigtails?
Assuming you’re not joking, because there’s a long, long history in Hollywood of white actors playing non-white roles, taking jobs from non-white actors and furthering stereotypes and cultural/societal biases that non-white people were lesser in various ways that served and continue to serve as obstacles in the paths of non-white children. There’s no such history going the other way, and no cultural/societal bias that serves as a significant obstacle for white children to succeed.
Also, both Idris Elba and Tessa Thompson are fantastic in their respective roles of Heimdall and Brynhilde. And the Asguardians aren’t Norse; they are alien protectors whom the Norse tribes regarded as gods in their own image. They could have five arms and purple skin, and the Norse would still portray them as pale-skinned humans, just as European Christians think Jesus picture Jesus of Nazareth as Young Ted Nugent.
On the other hand, Tom Cruise playing Karate Kid American Samurai in a blatant ripoff of a Kurosawa film isn’t just offensive; it’s really kind of stupid. And the fact that it took centuries before someone who could plausibly be a Moor was cast as Othello, The Moor of Venice in the titular role is just bizarre (and even moreso the difficulty of approrpiate casting in film adaptations) given that the subject matter is about Othello’s exclusion and Roderigo‘s jealousy of someone he views as beneath his station wooing and marrying Desdemona.
Stranger
I’m not down with this “Norse are really aliens” retcon. I read “Tales of Asgard” for many years when I collected comics and they were never portrayed as aliens. Heimdall I don’t care about because he was such a marginal character; Valkyrie was an iconic character with blonde hair. I’m not defending whitewashing whatsoever, but I think it has to go both ways. Leave the Nordic characters (or Nordic-looking characters) alone and let them be Nordic for chrissakes! And yes, let Black Panther and other Wakandans be black, and the same for Luke Cage. Add some more black heroes too, and Asian ones, and Latinx ones, and down the line. But let’s also keep some perspective when it comes to representation.
One of my podcasts complained that there were still too few black cast members on SNL, and too many white ones. There was some implicit notion there that it was “unfair” until the black castmembers were at least as numerous as white ones. But white people outnumber black people in the U.S. overall something like six to one!
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Meh, while I’ve got nothing against blond white depictions of traditional Norse deities, I think that within the MCU it’s a bit of a stretch to argue that extraterrestrial superbeings from a different dimensional plane of the universe have to manifest themselves on terrestrial visits exclusively in Nordic-ethnicity human form.
Which Kurosawa film?
Really? Did I actually say that somewhere? No limitations? Because that would be pretty dumb, but not at all what I said when I said there shouldn’t be an artificial limit in scope when considering something that was one phenomenon, like colonialism.
And Margrethe is not the government of Denmark. But nice try.
Do I *really *need to explain the concept of punching up vs punching down to you?
Well, I knew that. After all, you’re so clearly “proud of your Nordic heritage” … as they say.
Yes, let’s. Including the fact that white people are still very disproportionately overrepresented, and are in no danger of not having our voices heard in the media.
Do you have a cite for exactly what representation/diversity issue(s) the podcast was complaining about? Because advocating for representation of people of color isn’t confined to African-Americans.
(Also, given how massively white people have been overrepresented in American media up to now, I don’t see what would be wrong with having black people overrepresented sometimes. If we have a few years with a full half of the SNL cast being black, what’s wrong with that?)
First of all, I dunno if you want to stake your flag on Asgardian representations, what with Nordic god Thor speaking English like the King James Bible for about 40 years, but okay, let’s talk perspective: damn near every well-known comics character in the US was created and written by white guys during or just after the Jim Crow era, and the characters are white because they simply couldn’t picture them as otherwise, despite the fact some of them aren’t even human from the US, or from Earth; that was just the perspective at the time. We’ve had blacks in the US Army all along, but one wouldn’t be Captain America. Asians have been here over a century but Iron Fist is a white dude. I’ll always remember my uncle telling me he liked Spider-Man because with the full-face mask, he could pretend Peter Parker was black for a few pages.
The characters are being changed to fit modern perspectives in the transition to modern media, which seems pretty sensible, rather than slavishly clinging to an outdated perspective or adopting the awkward mantle-passing going on in legacy media right now.
I’d be curious what the ratio is in stand-up and improv, in general and at the top tiers- it might be that the proportions there aren’t the same as pure demographics (similar to some sports) and then the question becomes: should SNL proportions ideally reflect population demographics (so people see an “accurate” representation of the real world) or should it reflect talent pool demographics (so that hiring is seen to be unbiased in that regard).
I think the best explanation for this is that when you take a traditionally black character and make them white, you’ve taken one of a rather small handful of black characters away from black actors. Whereas when you take a white character and make them black, you’ve taken one of an untold smorgasbord of white characters and made them black.
There would be nothing wrong with it, if they were funny. (I thought “In Living Color” was great.) My problem was with the podcasters (sorry, the closest I can give to a cite is that it was the SNL Afterparty podcast sometime within the past few months; if you search my tweets, you might find when I engaged them on Twitter about it) saying that it was terrible and racist NOT to have equal numbers of black and white castmembers.
I would say they should have representation of every race if possible, and beyond that let the proportions fluctuate to whatever makes the funniest show.
Going back to Marvel Comics: I’m fine with rebooting other characters as nonwhite: Spider-Man, Bruce Banner, etc. I just think they should leave the Asgardians as blond and blue-eyed, and leave the Wakandans as black.
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The mass battle scenes in The Last Samurai are highly reminiscent of those in Ran and Kagemusha, to the point that you can make shot for shot comparisons. Of course, Kurosawa’s films are steeped in nuance and tension, with thematic depth of the tragedy of existence, while Zwick’s film just looks pretty but has no substance, because Kurosawa was a master filmmaker and Zwick is a hack (Legends of the Fall notwithstanding; one great film does not a career make).
And just because it has yet to be pointed out: Nick Fury was a grizzled white guy for decades before ‘Ultimate’ Nick Fury was modeled on Samuel L. Jackson, who was then recruited to play the character in the MCU. (Talk about dream casting!). Which one would you rather watch?
Stranger
I’ll take “About Last Night” over LotF. Zwick has also been behind some good TV series.
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