Archive for September, 2022
03 Sep 2022
Paul Tassi, writing in Forbes, notes the great discrepancy between the critics’ and the public’s reaction to Amazon’s billion-dollar take on Tolkien.
Amazon is not amused about the fanboy wars that have surrounded its billion dollar Lord of the Rings series, Rings of Power. Unlike its rival House of the Dragon, Rings of Power has become the latest front in the review bombing wars, the most recent since uh, She-Hulk. This happens a lot, okay?
The Rings of Power is getting slammed essentially everywhere that accepts fan reviews:
On Rotten Tomatoes, while its critics score is 84%, it has a 36% audience score.
On IMDB (which Amazon owns) it has a 6.2/10 with 25% of reviews being 1 star.
On Amazon itself, it has…nothing, because Amazon has disabled reviews of the series entirely. Normally when you watch an Amazon show or movie, whether it’s an original or not, it will have user star ratings there. But Rings of Power has zero reviews listed because Amazon didn’t want to be broadcasting its premiere with a low score right next to it, no doubt.
Why are fans mad this time? Take your pick of reasons. It’s a combination of racism, misogyny, and supposed unfaithfulness to Tolkien’s original work. Sometimes all three of these reasons are the same.
Among the reasons for the negative reviews:
Some fans are upset Galadriel is now a warrior instead of the sword-free sorceress she was in the LOTR trilogy. In general, the show has let its female characters slay out, including both Bronwyn and Galadriel.
There have been long, long running controversies about how the show has included black elves, dwarves and humans in this adaptation, as opposed to the overwhelmingly white original trilogy. Complaints are that this clashes with Tolkien’s original work and has led to debates about “whether dwarves can be black because they live underground.”
I read that the Harfoots having Irish/English country accents have offended some people in that region because they’re depicted as dirty, gypsy types.
Then just…take your pick of any number of things that die-hard Tolkien devotees see as the show departing from the source material, or skipping over parts that should have been adapted instead. The general idea is that Jackson’s trilogy was faithful to the work while this is not.
Again, I’m not saying any of this is correct, or even the majority opinion of fans, but all of it feeds into the reasons for the flood of low scores for the series.
RTWT
I found it interesting that Tassi had no difficulty identifying precisely what the enormous Tolkien fantasy readership base objected to, but had himself no such issues with what Amazon has done. His own god-like perspective as a card-carrying member of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) elite immunizes him from any emotional attachment to the author and the author’s original vision and conceptions and his consequent inevitable consciousness of his own superiority naturally causes him to dismiss condescendingly those inferior members of the mass readership audience who do care about such things as “fanboys” motivated by “racism.” Naturally, the unworthy opinions of these people, the sort who would prioritize fidelity to an author’s vision and texts over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, need to be censored and suppressed, coming from — what the generality of today’s journalists recognize as — “trolls.”
02 Sep 2022
Robert Spencer reminds voters that Joe Biden has always been a skunk.
Back in the 90s, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the establishment media hammered home the proposition that the individual character of a chief executive didn’t matter. He could be a cheerful rogue and serial philanderer like Bill Clinton, but the Left insisted that was a private matter and that the only thing Americans should care about was that he was a competent and capable president (which he wasn’t, but that’s another story). These assertions have become the conventional wisdom since then, but Old Joe Biden is now putting them to the test.
On Tuesday, Fox News’ Lisa Boothe enunciated a simple truth that shows that this Lewinsky-era conventional wisdom is wrong and has always been wrong: “One of the biggest lies we were ever told is that Joe Biden is a good man. He is a terrible president. Even worse human being.”
Boothe was spot-on, and it has been clear not just since the beginning of Biden’s political career but also since he was caught plagiarizing back when he was in law school. Boothe added: “If you think about it, this is a guy who led two of the most terrible confirmation hearings in American history, where he smeared and slandered Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas when he was Senate Judiciary chairman.”
On Oct. 23, 1987, the Senate rejected Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, largely because of a smear campaign and hysterical false charges that Biden had in great part engineered against the nominee. This was one day short of a month after Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign foundered on his own lies. Biden had delivered a speech full of what he claimed were his own family experiences. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife…is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?… Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”
This was supposed to sound stirring and probably was to those who go in for class warfare rhetoric, but those weren’t really Biden’s family’s experiences at all. He had lifted it all from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Thirty-four years ago, that was enough to derail a presidential campaign; now the same liar is president, and does anyone actually think that between then and now Biden has become honest and trustworthy?
Robert Bork’s widow doesn’t. Mary Ellen Bork wrote in September 2020: “I was there during the four months of vicious political campaigning against this judicial nominee, my husband, and in the Senate hearing room as then-Sen. Biden presided over a rigged hearing full of an unprecedented level of lying and distortion of a man known for his integrity and judicial wisdom. We will all have tears in our eyes if Joe Biden is elected president.” And he was elected, allegedly, and is now president, allegedly, and there is nothing alleged about the tears in our eyes. They’re all too real.
RTWT
01 Sep 2022
Larry Elder compiles a number of important predictions from established science.
“The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” —The New York Times, 1969.
“No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” —Redlands Daily Facts, 1970. …
“Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” —Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972. …
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” —Associated Press, 1989.
“Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” —former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., 2019.
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