Rant & Rave Season 8 [Spoilers]: When you are cool like a cucumber, as evil as the mother of madness, but never as perfect as the pet!

[SeanF]

4 minutes ago, Dracul's Daughter said:

I put this arguments amongst the "Flatt Earthers" ones.WTF is happening?!?!Are people making these arguments for the sake of standing out and shock or are really that dumb?Have we found some kind of back travell?

It’s hard to accept one’s ancestors (sometimes) behaved terribly.  Slavery was actually worse in the West Indies than in most of the USA, but we abolished it sooner, and it was never a domestic issue in the U.K.  So, it has no British apologists today, expect for people who like to play Devil’s advocate.

[Dracul's Daughter]

On 2/27/2021 at 7:48 PM, Le Cygne said:

Also thinking some more about how they blew the animal imagery that runs throughout the entire series... they like to use excuses that the magic and symbolism of the books is too hard for audiences to get.

But there's the classic example of sports teams. Many of them have animals as their mascot. That's something kids grow up with, and have fun with. It would have added something special to the show.

I remember that one scene that GRRM wrote for Arya, and he slipped in Sandor calling her "wolf girl" and I thought, YES! He got one in! But it stood out because it was so rarely done in the show.

Instantly, you get a picture of the character, it's shorthand for who they are. To not use it is bizarre.

 

"You are Arya of Winterfell, daughter of the north. You told me you could be strong. You have the wolf blood in you." 

"The wolf blood." Arya remembered now. "I'll be as strong as Robb. I said I would." She took a deep breath, then lifted the broomstick in both hands and brought it down across her knee. It broke with a loud crack, and she threw the pieces aside. I am a direwolf, and done with wooden teeth. 

 

"You stay here with the horses," said Arya. "I'll get rid of him. Come quick when I call."

Gendry nodded. Hot Pie said, "Hoot like an owl when you want us to come." 

"I'm not an owl," said Arya. "I'm a wolf. I'll howl." 

 

I was with an ear-to-ear smile when I read these passages.

[Lord Varys]

On the slavery issue, it is actually very noteworthy that George wrote an entire book about American slavery with Fevre Dream ... and Volantene and Slaver's Bay slavery is more a dialed-up version of American slavery than ancient slavery. Especially the part of the Ghiscari breeding slaves is something the Americans started to do after the British pulled the plug on the slave trade. The same with ridiculous applications of slaves and weirdo fights. Those are the more freakish and disgusting aspects of American slavery, but they are there.

And the kind of slavery apology we get in ADwD from Xaro Xhoan Daxos is more or less the same kind of thing George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could have used (or actually did do in their writings). We also get this kind of thing from Aristotle.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

On the slavery issue, it is actually very noteworthy that George wrote an entire book about American slavery with Fevre Dream ... and Volantene and Slaver's Bay slavery is more a dialed-up version of American slavery than ancient slavery. Especially the part of the Ghiscari breeding slaves is something the Americans started to do after the British pulled the plug on the slave trade. The same with ridiculous applications of slaves and weirdo fights. Those are the more freakish and disgusting aspects of American slavery, but they are there.

And the kind of slavery apology we get in ADwD from Xaro Xhoan Daxos is more or less the same kind of thing George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could have used (or actually did do in their writings). We also get this kind of thing from Aristotle.

Some readers think that Xaro speaks for the author, whereas it seems obvious to me that his arguments are being treated satirically.  Unless he’s changed his mind radically, Fevre Dreme gives the author’s opinions on the subject.

One of Jefferson’s motives for favouring a ban on the import of slaves was that it would give a boost to the Virginian economy, where they were bred for export to the rest of the South.  That said, Jefferson would probably have gone for Tyrion’s proposal.  He thought slavery wrong, but needed the income.  Others argued like Xaro or Aristotle, that it was a positive good.

 

[Le Cygne]

Well, slavery is evil, so it's a good thing that show got blasted out of the water.

One of the most controversial TV projects of the last decade is now firmly dead, it appears. In the middle of the run of Game of Thrones, it was announced that the smash-hit series’ showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were busy developing their next HBO show: Confederate...

Immediately the mere idea of this series was met with backlash. After all, the ramifications of slavery are still being felt in America today, and Benioff and Weiss haven’t particularly been praised for their tact or portrayal of women or people of color on Game of Thrones...

Needless to say, as Benioff and Weiss continued their 12-month-a-year job on Game of Thrones, the stink of Confederate never really went away. Despite the series being defended by HBO president Casey Bloys at the time, reports swirled that internally at HBO even staffers were upset by this tasteless idea.

https://collider.com/confederate-hbo-series-update-david-benioff-db-weiss/

This is more of that twisted worldview we've been talking about, that they demonstrated on Game of Thrones. A show piloted by two men who just didn't get the basics of humanity.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Some readers think that Xaro speaks for the author, whereas it seems obvious to me that his arguments are being treated satirically.  Unless he’s changed his mind radically, Fevre Dreme gives the author’s opinions on the subject.

I'd not say satirical, just an honest defense of slavery of the sort an educated slaver would give. In every slaver society slaves fulfill a function, and the people profiting from that like and defend that.

George goes to great lengths to show the corruption and physical rottenness of places like Natchez (which is basically his inspiration for Norvos) and, especially, New Orleans - which occupies the place Volantis has in ASoIaF. There is high culture and stuff there ... but things are rotten beneath the fine exterior and that's because of slavery and, especially, the slave trade.

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

One of Jefferson’s motives for favouring a ban on the import of slaves was that it would give a boost to the Virginian economy, where they were bred for export to the rest of the South.  That said, Jefferson would probably have gone for Tyrion’s proposal.  He thought slavery wrong, but needed the income.  Others argued like Xaro or Aristotle, that it was a positive good.

Well, Aristotle makes slavery a part of nature, completely natural by using an analogy about 'natural slaves' (simpletons, basically). Xaro is more enlightened - he understand that it is shitty, but a necessary evil for 'greatness'. It is still a shitty apology, though.

My thought was that the great enlightened fathers of the American Republic would agree with Xaro that the slavery they practiced was part of the reason why their country and economy was rising from the mud - and they would use that to defend the practice even if they also sort of realized they should not.

What blurs the lines there is that American slavery is justified by a completely baseless racist fantasy ideology ... whereas George completely dropped that aspect, making his slavery appear more like that of the ancients, but it is actually not as the whole breeding programs indicate. That kind of thing was done in the US, not in Greece or Rome.

[SeanF]

7 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I'd not say satirical, just an honest defense of slavery of the sort an educated slaver would give. In every slaver society slaves fulfill a function, and the people profiting from that like and defend that.

George goes to great lengths to show the corruption and physical rottenness of places like Natchez (which is basically his inspiration for Norvos) and, especially, New Orleans - which occupies the place Volantis has in ASoIaF. There is high culture and stuff there ... but things are rotten beneath the fine exterior and that's because of slavery and, especially, the slave trade.

Well, Aristotle makes slavery a part of nature, completely natural by using an analogy about 'natural slaves' (simpletons, basically). Xaro is more enlightened - he understand that it is shitty, but a necessary evil for 'greatness'. It is still a shitty apology, though.

My thought was that the great enlightened fathers of the American Republic would agree with Xaro that the slavery they practiced was part of the reason why their country and economy was rising from the mud - and they would use that to defend the practice even if they also sort of realized they should not.

What blurs the lines there is that American slavery is justified by a completely baseless racist fantasy ideology ... whereas George completely dropped that aspect, making his slavery appear more like that of the ancients, but it is actually not as the whole breeding programs indicate. That kind of thing was done in the US, not in Greece or Rome.

I think a lot of people assumed in 1776 that slavery would just wither away - as it did in the North.  But then, the growth of the cotton industry, the invention of the gin, and the ban on the import of slaves, gave a massive boost to the domestic institution.

[Count Balerion]

teenaged mutant ninja arya ....

interesting that aristotle's defence of slavery, as i recall, is one of his weakest arguments. not that i've read the whole corpus by a long shot.

and CONFEDERATE.

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, Count Balerion said:

teenaged mutant ninja arya ....

interesting that aristotle's defence of slavery, as i recall, is one of his weakest arguments. not that i've read the whole corpus by a long shot.

and CONFEDERATE.

I think it’s interesting that even many of the ancients were not persuaded by Aristotle. Romans generally never made the argument for natural slavery (how could they when so many citizens were freedmen?).  They simply saw it as necessary, while acknowledging that being a slave was a bad condition.

[Count Balerion]

i think one or more of the jurists said slaves were by natural law equal. i might be misremembering; it's been a while.

[Le Cygne]

I hadn't seen this one before, it was pretty good.

What was all about? We probably could have answered that question better at the end of season 1 than season 8. D&D took a show with clear political application and interesting approach to fantasy and made it DUMB.

 

[Dracul's Daughter]

12 hours ago, Le Cygne said:

I hadn't seen this one before, it was pretty good.

What was all about? We probably could have answered that question better at the end of season 1 than season 8. D&D took a show with clear political application and interesting approach to fantasy and made it DUMB.

 

One of the big,BIG mistakes that they did with the TV-show was cutting the fantasy away.Whay did they do such a stupid thing?!?It's a reason why Martin's books are a FANTASY genre.Another one was making the Night King,transforming The Others in Evil Lord with minnions.I'm sure in the books the battle against The Others,who will have their reason to rise against humanity,will be the last one and then we'll see how what's left of Westeros will recover.

[Morte]

On 3/3/2021 at 9:23 AM, SeanF said:

I think it’s interesting that even many of the ancients were not persuaded by Aristotle. Romans generally never made the argument for natural slavery (how could they when so many citizens were freedmen?).  They simply saw it as necessary, while acknowledging that being a slave was a bad condition.

Aristoteles, while being an important philosopher, is not that dominant in ancient thinking, the Stoa, Epikur (not: Naive Hedonism!) and the Pre-Socrats were much more widespread schools.

As becoming a slave could literary happen to everyone if one was unlucky (see Iulius Caesar's episode with the pirates), it was clear to everyone, that Aristoteles was talking nonsense here, his proto-racistic ramble (the darker people being wiser but more decadent and submissive, the paler people being more energetic and more bound to nature but like children and unable to control their emotions) was mostly ignored. There was a lot of cultural chauvinism in every direction in Antiquity, and some xenophobia, but racism was almost non-existent.

There are hints for the theory that racism is a result of ethnic-based slavery, not the other way around. And seeing how Aristotele's ramble about "races" became prevalent after the Arabic conquest, when most slaves were either white (Slavs - that's were the word slave is coming from), or black (Africa was raided for slaves very early on), and later with the rise of slavery in the European colonies (of course only the part about the black people ), the theory might be at least partially true.

 

On 3/3/2021 at 8:59 PM, Count Balerion said:

i think one or more of the jurists said slaves were by natural law equal. i might be misremembering; it's been a while.

You don't. It's in the Digesta - juristic teachings already hundreds of years old, when they were compiled into the Corpus Iuris Civilis under Iustinianos.

That's what people don't understand about the Roman phrase of "slaves being things" in the law - it's not thinking about the person as a thing, but a juristic construct to handle the status of a person, who is not sui iuris, but also not a member of the family and owned by another person. Of course, juristic logic lead to gruesome consequences, just as it did for members of the family who were not sui iuris (who originally were little more than slaves, as the pater familias could sell them, kill them etc. according to the Twelve Tables). These inhumanities were reduced over time (for the family members more than for slaves), with varied success.

[Lord Varys]

4 hours ago, Morte said:

There are hints for the theory that racism is a result of ethnic-based slavery, not the other way around. And seeing how Aristotele's ramble about "races" became prevalent after the Arabic conquest, when most slaves were either white (Slavs - that's were the word slave is coming from), or black (Africa was raided for slaves very early on), and later with the rise of slavery in the European colonies (of course only the part about the black people ), the theory might be at least partially true.

From what I know, it is pretty well-founded that modern 'scientific racism' is basically the dark side of the enlightenment, where people had to come up with 'reasons' why Colonialism and slavery were already a thing ... and they really had to justify somehow to get over the cognitive dissonance that all the new rights and freedoms didn't apply to the people they were exploiting and enslaving. That's why Kant and Hegel and many other 18th/19th century luminaries have their own racist ramblings.

Racist thinking as such was already prevalent in earlier times, though, as, for instance, expressed by nobility and royalty marrying among themselves. But that is a racist concept that keeps the elite apart from the rabble, it is not used as an ideology to create homogenous people or nation states. But it is one root of the idea that there are special people, and it changed over time, sort of like antisemitism changed when the justification became 'scientific' - although it is just a modernization of the earlier shit. Outside a Christian context there would be no need to invent non-religious reasons why the Jews suck.

Arab slavery also was kind of racist in the sense they were indeed raiding/buying slaves from sub-saharian Africa - and the skin color did get fused with their status as slaves back in Baghdad and the other city centers.

But overall - it is the technological/economical/political world domination thing of the Europeans in modernity that really pushed the idea of a hierarchy of human races and naturalized essentially arbitrary and temporary power relationships. And it basically starts as a process with Columbus, although the specialness of the European back then is justified more religiously ... it is very ugly how the indigenous folks all dying of European diseases is actually interpreted as an expression of the divine will that the land should go to the Europeans. Else god wouldn't have all of them dying like flies.

[SeanF]

4 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

From what I know, it is pretty well-founded that modern 'scientific racism' is basically the dark side of the enlightenment, where people had to come up with 'reasons' why Colonialism and slavery were already a thing ... and they really had to justify somehow to get over the cognitive dissonance that all the new rights and freedoms didn't apply to the people they were exploiting and enslaving. That's why Kant and Hegel and many other 18th/19th century luminaries have their own racist ramblings.

Racist thinking as such was already prevalent in earlier times, though, as, for instance, expressed by nobility and royalty marrying among themselves. But that is a racist concept that keeps the elite apart from the rabble, it is not used as an ideology to create homogenous people or nation states. But it is one root of the idea that there are special people, and it changed over time, sort of like antisemitism changed when the justification became 'scientific' - although it is just a modernization of the earlier shit. Outside a Christian context there would be no need to invent non-religious reasons why the Jews suck.

Arab slavery also was kind of racist in the sense they were indeed raiding/buying slaves from sub-saharian Africa - and the skin color did get fused with their status as slaves back in Baghdad and the other city centers.

But overall - it is the technological/economical/political world domination thing of the Europeans in modernity that really pushed the idea of a hierarchy of human races and naturalized essentially arbitrary and temporary power relationships. And it basically starts as a process with Columbus, although the specialness of the European back then is justified more religiously ... it is very ugly how the indigenous folks all dying of European diseases is actually interpreted as an expression of the divine will that the land should go to the Europeans. Else god wouldn't have all of them dying like flies.

Conversely, there's a sort of modern politically correct belief (and it can come up in discussions about Slavers Bay) that slavery wasn't too bad when it wasn't based on race.  Non-racist slavery is just as grim as the racist variety. 

[Count Balerion]

10 hours ago, Morte said:

You don't. It's in the Digesta - juristic teachings already hundreds of years old, when they were compiled into the Corpus Iuris Civilis under Iustinianos.

That's what people don't understand about the Roman phrase of "slaves being things" in the law - it's not thinking about the person as a thing, but a juristic construct to handle the status of a person, who is not sui iuris, but also not a member of the family and owned by another person. Of course, juristic logic lead to gruesome consequences, just as it did for members of the family who were not sui iuris (who originally were little more than slaves, as the pater familias could sell them, kill them etc. according to the Twelve Tables). These inhumanities were reduced over time (for the family members more than for slaves), with varied success.

i thought i remembered that. i catalogued law books back in the day, including roman law. i've forgotten most of it, sadly.

[Angel Eyes]

Question: In “The Bells”, Varys says that Jon would be a good king because he didn’t want power. Does Varys not remember that the last King who didn’t want power was Robert Baratheon, who was content to whore and drink, saddled with a job he didn’t want, and something Varys criticized about Robert in the past? Furthermore, one of the reasons Robert was so apathetic was because of the death of Lyanna Stark, the woman he cared about. Since Varys is trying to poison Daenerys, the woman Jon loves, how can he expect Jon to not degenerate as Robert did?

[Ghostlydragon]

25 minutes ago, Angel Eyes said:

Question: In “The Bells”, Varys says that Jon would be a good king because he didn’t want power. Does Varys not remember that the last King who didn’t want power was Robert Baratheon, who was content to whore and drink, saddled with a job he didn’t want, and something Varys criticized about Robert in the past? Furthermore, one of the reasons Robert was so apathetic was because of the death of Lyanna Stark, the woman he cared about. Since Varys is trying to poison Daenerys, the woman Jon loves, how can he expect Jon to not degenerate as Robert did?

I don't think even the two Dumbasses remembered that by the end.

[SeanF]

51 minutes ago, Angel Eyes said:

Question: In “The Bells”, Varys says that Jon would be a good king because he didn’t want power. Does Varys not remember that the last King who didn’t want power was Robert Baratheon, who was content to whore and drink, saddled with a job he didn’t want, and something Varys criticized about Robert in the past? Furthermore, one of the reasons Robert was so apathetic was because of the death of Lyanna Stark, the woman he cared about. Since Varys is trying to poison Daenerys, the woman Jon loves, how can he expect Jon to not degenerate as Robert did?

He argued against their marrying on the ground she would be “too strong.”  The implication is that he wants a weak, ineffectual ruler, leaving him free to govern.

Of course, I’m rationalising something they pulled out of their arses.

Jon, as portrayed in later seasons, was objectively incompetent as both ruler and commander.  In a way, one could say Sansa’s efforts to undermine him were justified on that ground.

[Angel Eyes]

9 minutes ago, SeanF said:

He argued against their marrying on the ground she would be “too strong.”  The implication is that he wants a weak, ineffectual ruler, leaving him free to govern.

Of course, I’m rationalising something they pulled out of their arses.

Jon, as portrayed in later seasons, was objectively incompetent as both ruler and commander.  In a way, one could say Sansa’s efforts to undermine him were justified on that ground.

So why did he complain about Robert being weak and ineffectual if he wants Jon to be weak and ineffectual?