rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnpW8H9UcAAe9GN?format=jpg&name=medium

as an Italian-ilxor, I can attest I have definitely been pulled over by a Lego Cop before, and it sucks

I went to a cute out of the way airshow of vintage planes last week, and one of the major bits of theater was the pretense than there was an escaped convict on the loose, dressed in striped prison PJs, evading the police. In the course of pursuit the man (thankfully played by a white person, it's not that kind of story at least) would, in desperation, grab onto a plane wing and be carried up in the air, only to be SHOT DOWN out of the air by the police, to the approval of all.

...

I wonder if that part of the skit hits different after Afghans died falling off planes? I'm not sure the organizers have that much awareness, sadly. But regardless of current events it was also very troubling to see shooting a prisoner normalized & celebrated.

It's true, once you see things with open eyes you can't enjoy a lot of things. I'm not lamenting that I'm just saying--people who think I'm some kind of killjoy have no idea how many things I'm *not* saying.

yeah any fun had at a "convict" or "criminal"'s expense is gross to me, including if the convict is white and it's just an old timey gag. you just know the laughing people are enjoying the idea of some poor person who is not them being hurt. maybe it reminds me of one of my favorite books i am a fugitive from a georgia chain gang in which the striped prison pjs were not such a fun time. and a lot of counties still make people wear those things!

"calculator and baseball" are probably the front of a safe. the piece is called a mailbox front.

that makes a lot of sense, and i know it's right.

but come on, that's a calculator + baseball

Looks like an ATM that was ripped out of a wall.

why was there a box of fish in the middle of the road

grip the baseball like a curveball in order to access checking

it was planted there earlier so duke detain could use it in pursuit

https://i.imgur.com/QqMQKOS.png

fish basket is the g-rated version of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BabyCarriage

yeah the fish thing is very very confusing to me

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M1-V6-sV014/TP2roxpZeQI/AAAAAAAAGCo/kAP7vbr2CR4/s280/LewZealand_and_Fish.jpg

"thug" - racist 99% of the time, right?

i have conservative family members who have discovered the joy of using "thug" lately. needless to say they're now blocked on my phone.

depends on context. plenty of people call police, feds, and/or right-wing militia boneheads thugs. or at least i do. but i'm guessing you're asking about a context where the answer is "yup"

tbh i don't think "thug" is ever a good word

i prefer sadist or bootlicker

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/theater/aladdin-broadway-jonathan-freeman-jafar.html

As far as Jafar goes, I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain. I never thought of him as being North African, Middle Eastern, Asiatic, South Asian. I never thought of any of those things. I always thought of him as being a villain. The makeup that I put on was never meant to be race. It was always villain’s makeup.

sigh

the honest answer, seems to me, is the character is an obvious racist stereotype, repeated so often that everyone agrees to pretend its not for the sake of commerce and continuity and without a celebrity and grass roots accuser to point out the emperor has no clothes, disney is happy to keep on keepin' on.

many people unabashedly love orientalism is how I break it down to an extent

animated cartoons are incredibly fertile ground for race stereotypes, but disney makes too much money off this shit to mess with its basic formula. they offset the racist villain with a de-racinated hero/princess and call it good.

They're currently making a big noise about casting a Latina actress in the lead for their upcoming live action remake of Snow White...but she's still called Snow White.

also there are still comedy relief dwarfs in it

Rolling is this size-ist? Thread

as long as we're here

Deeply strange pic.twitter.com/ycilbi1iNL

— James Kelleher (@etienneshrdlu) January 25, 2022

and speaking of size-ist
https://www.indiewire.com/2022/01/peter-dinklage-snow-white-remake-1234693486/

“I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. You’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me,” the actor told Maron. “You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the fuck are you doing man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”

The original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the first full length animated feature from Disney, and remains one of the studio’s most iconic films. Dinklage’s concerns can be interpreted as part of a larger discussion of whether old art can be judged by newer moral standards. As society’s views evolve, the debate over whether problematic works should be buried or studied continues to rage on. For his part, Dinklage doesn’t think the story of “Snow White” needs to be hidden. He just wants to see the problematic aspects addressed, saying “if you tell the story of ‘Snow White’ with the most f—ed up, progressive spin on it? Let’s do it. All in.”

That second graf is such bullshit, fuck Indiewire

i will agree that "As society’s views evolve, the debate over whether problematic works should be buried or studied continues to rage on" is not a particularly helpful sentence; looks like somebody needed to beef up their word count.

Peter Dinklage: "I don't like this brand new thing Disney is making"

IndieWire: SHLOULD WE CANCEL BAMBI?!?!?!

Snow White should've never been a brunette in the first place.

When speaking of fantasy creatures, some authorities prefer "Dwarves," or - in extremely formal settings - "Dwarrows."

Dunno if I’m trapped in a leftist echo chamber but it’s hard to read people flying Australian flags on Jan 26 (Australia Day if you’re celebrating the founding of the colony, Invasion Day if you acknowledge the theft of an entire continent from people systematically wiped out so as not to interfere with that process) as saying anything but “fuck you” to Aboriginal Australia. It’s fine if you want to celebrate the nation, but choosing to do it on a day which has this obvious implication is literally choosing familiarity over the grief of an entire people.

Just finished the Kier-la Janisse Folk Horror doc and it was interesting to see the Australian bicentennial celebrations cast there as a slap in the face to indingenous communities; this logic obv applies to the American bicentennial as well but whenever I see that referenced the narrative is still just about malaise.

This is a pretty illuminating doco - can’t find it online free: https://beamafilm.com/catalogue-product/australia-daze?focus=true

There's so much ugly stuff going on all the time, it's easy to get jaded, but inevitably something comes around that's so utterly fucked, you have to wonder how much worse it will get.

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges. https://t.co/L5Vi13VX1d

— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) February 11, 2022

You can take the boy out of South Africa but...

To answer your question, yes, this is racist.

So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.

I wasn't really wondering, in case that wasn't obvious

Moodles OTM. This is some extremely committed throwback old school racism

Bracing.

so i follow a few national parks on facebook, and apparently last week was "national invasive species awareness week" (NISAW). capitol reef national park and great basin national park both did a few posts about it. capitol reef chose to highlight the tumbleweed, which is russian thistle that was introduced to the american west in the late 1800s. kind of an interesting choice considering what's going on in the world. someone commented "fuck tumbleweeds." it seemed to me like idk something else must be contributing to the passion behind that comment other than the inherent badness of tumbleweeds.

then great basin national park, which is in the middle of nowhere in nevada and often posts questionable things related to climate change, straight up posted a meme image asserting that more species extinctions are attributable to invasive species than to human caused climate change (with no citation). which is very disingenuous considering invasive species are human caused.

anyway, invasive species - the more i think about it the more it's basically a reflection of xenophobia and american nationalism? is there any soundness to the concept, when "invasive species" have been the majority of what's going on environmentally worldwide for idk hundreds of years? it also seems like the mainstream of environmental science or whatever the name of the field we're talking about here has moved past the concept and argues that it's outlived its usefulness. from a quick glance at google. idk if we have any environmental scientists or anything here to elucidate but is this generally what's going on?

anyway, invasive species - the more i think about it the more it's basically a reflection of xenophobia and american nationalism?

no. geez, learn some ecology. ecosystems that evolved in isolation from other ecosystems are very highly integrated and balanced

is there any soundness to the concept, when "invasive species" have been the majority of what's going on environmentally worldwide for idk hundreds of years?

fuck me. hundreds of years you say? biology on earth has been evolving for approximately 1 billion years. and trans oceanic migration and successful establishment of non-local species before humans got involved was on the order of maybe idk one species per ten thousand years.

Also, not all non-native introduced species become invasive!

It's not just the US where you hear about "invasive species" btw. You hear a lot about it in the UK, what with being an island and all.

reminds me of the strange case of the murder/suicide lab technician who claimed in his suicide note it was all because of his fear of Japanese Knotweed.

map, the nib had a recent article talking about this. The concept obviously not being that ecosystems can't be disturbed by new arrivals, but that the vocabulary around this is coded in xenophobic ways, and that this is reflected in some of the strategies employed against them as well.