George Lucas was notoriously ambivalent and dismissive of the EU. The one character he was super stoked to get into his version of the sequels?
Darth Talon. IYKYK, otherwise do a quick search once you’re not at the office.
My man has some issues to sort out, or maybe he already has, and he has some specific kinks he wants to evangelize.
I don’t know why Techdirt is so concerned about the so-called “COVID denialism.” They call it themselves when they suggest it might be mocking. Judge Walker was an Obama appointee and has been remarkably sane in his judicial career, including on COVID. He is clearly trolling the state’s attorney at several points throughout, letting their previous positions hoist them on their own petard. I particularly like the point he raises about how Florida handles parental rights:
THE COURT: Well, we’ve empowered parents to control what books our kids read in school. Why is it far-fetched to empower parents and think they know best for their individual children about who they are engaging with socially on social media platforms?
MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, parents certainly have a role, but the key is these controls. And the controls have proven ineffective. So these platforms —
THE COURT: You are taking the control away. Because if I’ve got a 13-year-old child and I want him to — does my kid get to sign up if I want him to be able to sign up and have an account in a social media platform on Facebook?
MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: You can register for an account and a kid can use your account, and you can monitor them. THE COURT: I don’t want to monitor them. Just like I want them to read the book about the two penguins raising an egg together. The two male penguins raising an egg together. I don’t want to sign up on my account. I want to have my own Facebook account. I want my kid — you’ve taken that choice away from me; right?
MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: I just think it’s an irrelevant issue because their — I mean, the degree of control that parents have is irrelevant. What’s —
THE COURT: The point, Counsel — and I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched — is the State of Florida picks and chooses when they want the parents to be making the decision. And when it suits their purposes, they do; and when it doesn’t, they don’t.
But I’ve got it. Fair enough.
It’s not that there’s no argument against letting children on social media. There are strong arguments, but the science is not mature maybe never will be, and the experiences parents permit their children to have can vary wildly. The point is that under the US system, you can’t make laws that limit free speech and private family behavior based on “this is probably not a great idea,” and if you can, then social conservatives will not always like where that leads.
Bridge over Troubled Bacta
Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.
Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.
What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.
I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)
Pretty slow, but there are some of us here.
So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.
Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.
Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.
I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”
Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.
If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.
Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.
Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart. Your options get better if you can live without it being collapsible.
LOL, which is funny because it’s really more like a regional third-class German dialect with the “Latin Vocabulary Add-on Package.” The rules, especially as actually spoken, are much more German, and while you can calculate the actual number many different ways, of the most commonly spoken English words, the Germanic ones dominate.
I mean, I was messing around a bit to make it more fun, but yeah, you start with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and a few Frisians invading and having to come to a sort of mutually intelligible Germanic dialect (to the extent they even did), adding some Celtic place names and lingering Roman verbiage and practices, though I guess they would have been dealing with the latter all along. There will be Scandinavian injections from subsequent raiders, especially in the North and East.
Then 1066 comes and the Normans, speaking Viking French invade and displace English as the language of court and bring in thousands of words that rework the vocabulary extensively, especially for uses that reveal the social divide (e.g. “cow” for the animal, “beef” for the food made from it). English survives but has several centuries with no one in power giving a single shit about how it changes.
Then the scholastic era begins and gives birth the Renaissance, and the printing press makes an appearance, so you’ve got increased literacy in Latin mostly in the early going, and the types of knowledge that are coming in often have no direct cognates in English, so English being English (and not French, LOL), they just say “fuck it, you’re an English word too, now.” Many of them die off or get relegated to narrow fields where the specificity remains valuable, but many stick around to offer polysyllabic nuance to English, especially among the literate class who will necessarily dominate what comes down to us in writing. This is also the gang that decided that if a rule of grammar works in Latin, it should in English, leading to idiocies like “don’t split your infinitives.” Why the fuck not, Clarence or Godfrey or whoever? The infinitive is already two different words, Godfrey, and it is exceedingly easy to carefully split it and preserve or even increase the effectiveness of the communication. Fuck you, Godfrey. 😂
The Great Vowel shift occurs over this period as well, for unknown reasons (some have hypothesized it was simply younger generations wanting to distinguish themselves from elders and newcomers to London), and unfortunately just at the time when people decided the spelling should become more consistent, so while most English words have some reason for being spelled how they are, you often have to do some historical spelunking to figure out what those reasons are, and it’s only marginally helpful to know that rough and through used to rhyme.
Finally, as English becomes a language of colonization and empire, influences come from everywhere, and the general trend of adopting new items and new ideas with something like their original “foreign” term continues at an accelerated pace. Even as the one empire faded, a new English-speaking hegemon was emerging, one who if anything was somehow even less concerned about linguistic purity.
That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.
This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.
Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.
I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.
With English, it’s even more fun, because it was (1) first lightly Celticized, then (2) lightly Romanized, then (3) significantly Romanized by a close cousin of the Germanicized Romance Language that had been extra Germanicized by Vikings, then (4) Roman-frosted with a bunch of technical jargon, some of which seeped into the upper registers of “regular” speech, and finally (5) liberally dusted with a sprinkle of “Literally Everything Else.”
Oh, and spelling will have stopped being updated sometime between steps 3 and 4, and immediately before most of the vowels changed sounds, because skibidi toilet rizz.
One of my college roommates is an algorithmic high frequency trader. It always reminded me slightly of a legal version of the Superman 3/Office Space scam. Basically trade so fast whenever your algorithm sees the line go up the right way that you harvest tiny amounts all day before the humans actually making financially relevant decisions make the market move in larger chunks for actual economic reasons.
It’s taking money while providing literally zero value to anyone else, even your fellow finance bros.
Well, then there’s the Indiana Jones brainstorming session with Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan.
I guess by the time the movie gets made, between script changes and casting decisions, nothing is certain and 17-22 is probably most likely, but George is a product of his time and place, and not exclusively in good ways.