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karaddin

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Everything posted by karaddin

  1. I'm not saying there will be, I'm saying the avalanche of "this movie is a failure" articles started hitting my "recommended news story" feed on Friday Australian time. And I can understand the various things that go into both rushing the story out to try get eyeballs and algorithm optimization to increase the odds of Google deciding I should see it (I don't), but that doesn't make it actually healthy for your industry to have so much riding or dying like that. And that's got nothing to do with this movie specifically and whether I'll like that or not, nor does it have anything to do with the politics of the movie and whether it aligns with mine. Movies that aren't for me should have just as much of a shot of finding success as those that are.
  2. I'm also so sick of this need to form a meta narrative about the success of a movie literally one to two days after it comes out, even if I understand where it comes from. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that I feel is hampering the ability for some movies to have longer than usual legs on a strong word of mouth response - the weak box office opening can become the only narrative there is about the movie, it's a failure. I don't get out that much lately, and dragging myself out on opening weekend isn't something I feel like doing that much even when it's something I was quite looking forward to. Then this conversation sticks and it starts undermining my enthusiasm to go even though I know on a conscious level that it's dumb. It's happened with a couple of movies in the last year or two and I felt a little of it with this already as well that I'm trying to ignore. Gotta give things a chance to succeed before deciding that they've failed.
  3. Yeah I only watched a couple of minutes but that collapse animation is pretty damn good for something you're not even meant to see beyond the camera being attached to it.
  4. I'd seen speculation that they'd do just that with Renslayer, but I don't think that fits too well with her character as seen so far
  5. I did wonder if that's where she was, but the pyramid threw me and then I promptly forgot about it lol. If that was there last season then I'd forgotten, and yes I definitely forgot Alioth as well
  6. Yeah I wasn't sure what the thing with Renslayer was meant to indicate. Only thing I could thing of with purple lighting and pyramids is Apocalypse from X-Men? But that's just a very vague maybe wrong memory from the 90s cartoon.
  7. Yeah one of the things that struck me watching the destruction of Al-Azhar University is how crushing it would be if you'd spent decades trying to build up this avenue for people to try better themselves and get some opportunities in life just to watch it all be utterly destroyed in a literal minute. I certainly wouldn't have the energy to start from scratch knowing it can be torn back down in a moment due to Hamas fucking you over by hijacking the area (and subsequent Israeli response) or just the whim of a fucked Israeli leader.
  8. I'd say its hard to claim something is a hoax when its easily verified by looking out the window on a trans...Pacific? Atlantic? flight, but plenty of people irl manage to think that about things that are also quite thoroughly verified. But yeah, the light references was all it would have taken for me, I didn't need entire stories structured around the psychological impact of finding out Earth was essentially an egg, just a few throw away references.
  9. The enormous celestial sticking out of the middle of the ocean just being forgotten certainly doesn't enhance the feelings of connectivity across the franchise
  10. The problem with trying to make lasting peace in scenarios like this is that it only takes a relatively small number of bad actors to derail attempts to improve the situation. In this respect the attack on Oct 7 is a bit of an outlier in terms of having larger numbers involved than would typically be the case, although I guess I wouldn't say that things were on a particularly improving trajectory beforehand for anything to be "derailed". Even counting all of Hamas that's still only 1-2% of the population though, and they've sure gone and fucked things up. ----- Not a reply to Tywin below I have no idea why the argument about recent history is going on though, surely you can both hold that the existence of a safe homeland for Jews is a good thing that needs to continue, but also that bad things happened in the creation of its modern version which had some Palestinians suffering injustice? Plenty of that blame for that is going to lie with the nations that declared war on Israel and attacked it, leading to the current borders. It doesn't actually matter which of the other actors holds what proportion of the blame, just that it leaves us with the situation we are now in. I saw a video circulating last night claimed to be Al-Azhar University getting absolutely levelled by IDF bombs, but I haven't seen any Western media outlets reporting on it. I did see that there was a University bombed 3 weeks ago, but what little I watched of that looked like it was a different university but perhaps it's just a different video from the opposite angle. Does anyone know if that was actually a separate uni being destroyed or if it's the same one with the footage recycled?
  11. I'm definitely enjoying Loki while I'm watching it but not so sure how I feel when sitting with it afterwards. I think it's probably the nature of the beast when you're dealing with a wrapped around time travel story, I need to see whether the finale pulls it together into a satisfying bow or just ends up an ugly knot of Kang strings.
  12. Bringing back Ironman and Black Widow is a terrible idea, it's the white flag to the idea of trying to come up with any new stories or move forward.
  13. I'm not sure if you're asking if Hamas have offered to release hostages in exchange for a ceasefire at all, or asking if they've indicated they would accept an explicitly temporary one?
  14. This whole arguing semantics honestly feels like moving goal posts to me. I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "humanitarian pause" used as though it's the official term for this before the last month, it's always just been called a ceasefire - maybe it's in common use inside the US and I've just never seen it spill out before? Regardless, taking support for a ceasefire as support for Hamas is a much larger and worse faith jump than I've been told is ok - I thought we're supposed to only address the explicit things said, not draw inferences. Regardless of that I thought there was broad agreement (here at least) that Hamas was trying to provoke severe action from Israel, which Israel has certainly been giving them. Their constant insistence that they want a ceasefire and will release the hostages is part of that same action - they want to be able to shout far and wide that they're here trying to be reasonable and negotiate, stop the fighting but Israel is ignoring them and killing civilians in the name of getting at a single commander. It's propaganda and playing right into their hands. A ceasefire doesn't make Hamas win, it's calling their bluff. So fuck them, stop killing civilians and work towards ending Hamas without murdering civilians and handing them the exact propaganda they want.
  15. Because they can so easily exit this warzone to a place they will definitely be safe? That's some preem victim blaming bs right there. The entire area is likely to become a war zone in the near future and plenty of people will choose to risk staying and dying in their homes over being displaced, fail to get anywhere remotely safe and still get killed anyway. Yeah. If you were dealing with an enemy that prioritized their own civilians and ensured they were getting the food and water then you *might* be getting some military value out of it, but we all agree that sure isn't Hamas. So if they're just going to steal all the food and water reserves you're not degrading their combat capability, you're just punishing the civilians. So that argument goes out the window. The petrol situation also becomes more defensible (from Israel's perspective) if you haven't cut off electricity since the hospitals aren't relying on generators to have power. I'd still be opposed personally, but that would be much more defensible than what's happened.
  16. Have any of the posters objecting to this bombing based that objection on a disbelief that the Hamas commander was there? Mine certainly isn't, it's the his presence doesn't justify killing those civilians. No amount of possible tunnels under the area is going to change that view. And if the IDF don't see the description of the area being full of refugees, why was their spokesman nodding along in agreement with that characterisation of the area and insisting that one Hamas commander justified bombing all these accepted civilians and refugees. The clear answer to this last is the because they do see this as justified on that basis, and it's an assessment you and others in this thread share, while myself and still others in this thread emphatically do not. So why not just accept that like that IDF spokesman did and at least honestly and openly articulate our positions? Instead of trying to make it sound all shady like these people don't matter because they're just refugees on a technicality.
  17. As much as I'd love to be, I'm not a pacifist and have accepted that Israel was never going to take that route in responding to this. I still have major issues with the response taken and say there's a lot of room between this and pacifism, but you know my stance there. My point was just trying to help you understand the argument Fionwe was making, it's not mine. I just didn't know if you'd made the connection to the earlier posted link about the Mumbai attack to realize that's what Fionwe was referring to.
  18. I know this attack on Israel was an order of magnitude worse, but the Mumbai hotel attack was pretty damn shocking and large scale. I'm pretty sure it's what fionwe is pointing to as the case of his country opting to take a different approach in the face of a shocking attack and citing that story with the former Indian PM claiming that it was borne out to be the correct response. What Fionwe is advocating for isn't completely devoid of historical precedent.
  19. Maybe this was naive of me, but I genuinely believed prior to waking up this morning that the majority of governments, even including the US, would have said "you don't bomb the refugee camp" when confronted with the decision of letting a terrorist commander potentially get away vs openly bombing a refugee camp. I would have thought they might have tried to do it and spin it, but I'm genuinely shocked by the idea that the commonly accepted international response to the idea would be "welp, sucks about the refugees but you've got to bomb them". It would seem at the very least I wasn't alone in that naivety.
  20. You don't get back closer to the line you want by running in the opposite direction.
  21. If you're struggling to understand the argument Altherion is advancing, try thinking of the stories we see of American cops taking preemptive use of deadly force in scenarios we find unreasonable, but are exonerated by their courts and management on the grounds of experiencing sincere fear for their lives. It's ultimately the same idea. The lives of non citizen civilians are a non consideration, so you're entirely justified in killing as many of them as you need to in order to avoid military casualties. And it's certainly been the MO for plenty of history. It's just not the world I want to live in.
  22. I would assume completely amoral self interest that treats future international blow back as an externality and thus irrelevant. It's far from the first time I've seen the edges of that sentiment and it's pretty clearly evident in some things the US/Americans do/say but it's normally not just stated openly like that.
  23. Can't say I'm used to seeing that argument openly articulated and I find it pretty fucking reprehensible personally.
  24. I didn't say industrial or economic base, I said support base. I'm talking about the source of recruits at the high end, and just general willingness to aid them or look the other way at the low end, within Gaza. Feel free to check my comments in past threads as I don't want to derail with yet another long post about it, but I'm not pretending it's easy. I just think it's both necessary and the moral thing to do. My point here was simply that in my opinion the life of an evil fuck isn't worth bombing a refugee camp, even if he manages to escape as a result. That's an ethical red line I'm not open to crossing. And yes that's going to open a utilitarianism argument that will ultimately boil down to our personal values, I've just already stated mine and don't want to jump on the hypothetical trolley of "but what if bombing a refugee camp saved 1 million/billion/trillion etc lives".
  25. I'd wait for a better option than bombing a refugee camp just to get at him. But I also wouldn't have taken all the preceding actions that have resulted in the current situation so I'm not a very useful hypothetical. I know I'm beating a dead horse here in terms of what I think should have been done, but I would have prioritized attacking the support base of Hamas over directly killing their current members when they're not in the open and able to be killed without major collateral. Also a whole bunch of other things i know we don't even disagree on (not cutting off food/water/services for minimal military gain etc), so certainly nothing to argue about there.
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