Random Rant Thread

[K1power]

Americans/Westerners losing their shit over something so trivial as a celebrity bitchslap is fully expected.

That said, while one could argue Rock's joke was in bad taste, Smith's reaction sets a bad precedent as it more or less greenlights violence against entertainers when someone else feels offended in a comedy club or whatever.

Also, Will Smith 'defending the honor' of his wife who on National TV admitted to sleeping around is hilarious. That whole family is, collectively, one of Hollywood's biggest attention whores that needs to make everything about them.

Edit: Yay 400 pages..?

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LOL. I laughed for real.

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This man has been so chronically ill for several years that his Covid-minimizing schtick might have taken its toll on a serious level. I know a Real Man is not supposed to bitch about health, but being a right-wing reactionary can be pretty bad for your health, man.

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The latest trend on social network seems to be to assert that Russia is actually poorer than Ukraine. Don't ask me what's the point. I'm just telling you that's what a lot of people, including some Serious People, are saying online now.

GDP per capita? NO, bad metrics! Because that doesn't take into consideration the huge income inequality in Russia! And you know what, I'm from Finland, and my grandparents used to tell me how Russian soldiers were amazed at the quality of life in Finland... Yes! I'm from Poland, and my grandparents told me...

And so on and on. It gives me a headache. And some guy wanders into the thread to point out that the GDP gap is simply too enormous, and then gets dunked on hard by a horde of amateur economists who tell him that he doesn't understand economics.

Heh.

So much bullshit that I just want them to go ahead and loudly assert that Russians are genetically inferior or something, if that somehow makes them feel good. 

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It was just a matter of time. We knew it was coming. Somebody was going to do it.

"Will Smith Doctrine"

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Backpedalling like mofo's, but that's the merit of having never been specific about anything at all. Take "Denazification". No one knows what the fuck that actually means - many people in the west assumed regime change, but I didn't - so Putin can say "Mission Accomplished" if Russia defeats the Azov Battalion in Mariupol. Or even if the Chechen troops destroy some minor neo-nazi volunteer squads in some middle-of-nowhere town around Kharkiv.

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The bitchslap was pretty embarrassing for sure, but it still pales in comparison to the NFT/crypto boom in Hollywood. The former was at least good TV, whereas...

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Quick Guardian review:


Johnson hopes Putin’s war will save him, but don’t be fooled – ‘Partygate’ still matters
Owen Jones
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/29/boris-johnson-putins-war-partygate-ukraine-no-10

Does it, though? It should, but does it? I see it kind of fizzling out, and I'm not even sure if that's entirely because of the war.


Putin has a 21st-century digital battle plan, so why is he fighting like it’s 1939?
John Naughton
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/26/putin-has-a-21st-century-digital-battle-plan-so-why-is-he-fighting-like-its-1939

For those who follow these things professionally, the biggest puzzle is why Putin embarked on a campaign that looks like the second world war in Technicolor, when his military actually had an ultra-sophisticated plan for warfare in a digital age. It’s called the Gerasimov doctrine and it was the creation in 2013 of Valery Gerasimov, a smart lad who is chief of the general staff and first deputy defence minister of the Russian Federation.

No, the biggest puzzle is, how come someone who doesn't even know that the so-called Gerasimov doctrine *doesn't actually exist* - it's pure fiction - can be asked by a major newspaper to pontificate about "Putin's battle plan"? 

LOL @ "For those who follow these things professionally". Those "professional" people would never mention the non-existent "Gerasimov doctrine" and quote Molly McKew as if she were a serious person, regardless of their political stance, unless they are *professional propagandists*, that is. 

Who the fuck is this Twitter-troll-level idiot? Shit like this gives the impression that the Guardian is just not a serious newspaper.

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Mar 29, 2022 12:18:25 GMT 1 K1power said:

Americans/Westerners losing their shit over something so trivial as a celebrity bitchslap is fully expected.

That said, while one could argue Rock's joke was in bad taste, Smith's reaction sets a bad precedent as it more or less greenlights violence against entertainers when someone else feels offended in a comedy club or whatever.

Also, Will Smith 'defending the honor' of his wife who on National TV admitted to sleeping around is hilarious. That whole family is, collectively, one of Hollywood's biggest attention whores that needs to make everything about them.

Edit: Yay 400 pages..?

My reaction to it has been pretty much all ridicule and cynicism, but if someone asked me for a serious answer, I would just refer them to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's opinion.

Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing
kareem.substack.com/p/will-smith-did-a-bad-bad-thing?s=r

Let’s start with the facts: Rock made a reference to Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, as looking like Demi Moore in GI Jane, in which Moore had shaved her head. Jada Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, which causes hair loss. Ok, I can see where the Smiths might not have found that joke funny. But Hollywood awards shows are traditionally a venue where much worse things have been said about celebrities as a means of downplaying the fact that it’s basically a gathering of multimillionaires giving each other awards to boost business so they can make even more money...

...Smith’s slap was also a slap to women. If Rock had physically attacked Pinkett Smith, Smith’s intervention would have been welcome. Or if he’d remained in his seat and yelled his post-slap threat, that would have been unnecessary, but understandable. But by hitting Rock, he announced that his wife was incapable of defending herself—against words. From everything I’d seen of Pinkett Smith over the years, she’s a very capable, tough, smart woman who can single-handedly take on a lame joke at the Academy Awards show.

Athletes love to play intellectual, but I see absolutely no one even remotely close to Jabbar's level. He's the definition of a commonsensical public intellectual: Not too academic, but never one to dumb down things. Literally a giant on and off the court.

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It must be some kind of a masochistic comedy act to even take the risk of *appearing to* gloat over Hong Kong's plight when the very fucking country that you govern is the 4th worst one in the wealthy world, after the US, Italy and Belgium, in terms of the lives lost to Covid per capita. "Better than the US" doesn't say much, and I'd definitely put them in the category of Screwed Up Royally. They've lost 57% more lives per capita than Germany, 89% more than the Netherlands. 89%! And I wouldn't even call the Netherlands, let alone Germany, a Covid success story. They have done relatively well, but could've easily done better.

Why are those people so ghoulish and foolish?

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MAYBE, we should officially make it an international competition, a Covid World Cup, and update the numbers every week, draw a neat chart and put it up on the gigantic wall in Geneva. Then MAYBE those people will shut up seeing even Hong Kong have a loooooooong way to go to catch up with them despite the Omicron mayhem.

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It's hard to miss this trend if you live in urban areas in Japan. I don't know how much negative effect this enormous pandemic disruption will have on it - I'd guess it would be very substantial - but despite the huge language barrier - the *mutual* barrier, that is - there have been tons of foreigners coming and living here over the past decade.

Japan above France and Switzerland.

I'd say Britain's fall is more ominous than America's.

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Both boomers and Gen-Xers in the US tend to have a very outdated view on Japan. When they say that Japan is a very insular xenophobic culture (boomers), or that it's a very unique, interesting, weird one that has little to do with the "Western" sensibilities (Gen-X'ers), they aren't totally wrong, because both are still true to some extent.

But they are completely wrong on the degree/extent to which they are. Their knowledge hasn't been updated for nearly two decades.

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I take it that this shit is pretty much obligatory every fucking time, particularly on the British mainstream media. The dudes who are busy decorating themselves with Wolfsangle and Schwarze Sonne are not Nazis. No, no, no, they are just cool symbols.

I've ranted more than enough about this crap re: Syria too. So I'll spare you that.

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Super hot take, but it happens to be related to a previous rant of mine.

I mean, the Polish language would've *looked* simpler and neater with Cyrillic alphabets, because it's a Slavic language in every single aspect. The linguistically rational thing for a Slavic language to do is adopt Cyrillic, but the issue of Catholic/Orthodox got in the way.

Vietnamese is also a bit of a mess due to the Latin-alphabet-ization. It's a colonial thing, but so was the Catholic/Orthodox issue in a broad sense.

Anyway, war has this uncanny power to reveal the true colors of those who aren't even directly involved in it. This is pure bigotry.