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From the New York Times news section:
Life Imitates Art as a ‘Master and Margarita’ Movie Stirs Russia
An American director’s adaptation of the beloved novel is resonating with moviegoers, who may recognize some similarities in its satire of authoritarian rule.
By Paul Sonne
Feb. 16, 2024By all appearances, the movie adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult favorite novel “The Master and Margarita,” in Russian theaters this winter, shouldn’t be thriving in President Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia.
Stalin was a huge fan of one of Bulgakov’s plays, so he didn’t have him shot. But he wouldn’t let him publish new work either. The writer, a brave man, wrote to the tyrant to complain that he was going to starve. So Stalin, a more complicated figure than in Trotskyite legend, gave Bulgakov a job as a theatrical director, while Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in secret.
It wasn’t published until the 1960s. Mick Jagger read a translation and incorporated it into “Sympathy for the Devil.”
The director is American. One of the stars is German. The celebrated Stalin-era satire, unpublished in its time, is partly a subversive sendup of state tyranny and censorship — forces bedeviling Russia once again today.
But the film was on its way to the box office long before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times. The state had invested millions in the movie, which had already been shot. Banning a production of Russia’s most famous literary paean to artistic freedom was perhaps too big an irony for even the Kremlin to bear.
Its release — after many months of delay — has been one of the most dramatic and charged Russian film debuts in recent memory….
More than 3.7 million people have flocked to see the film in Russian theaters since its Jan. 25 premiere, according to Russia’s national film fund.
… State networks didn’t promote the movie the way they normally would for a government-funded picture. And the state film fund, under pressure after the release, removed the movie’s production company from its list of preferred vendors.
The antics spurred a new wave of moviegoers, who rushed to theaters fearing the film was about to be banned. …
[Director Michael] Lockshin, who grew up both in the United States and Russia but is an American citizen, signed on to the project in 2019, choosing a Quentin Tarantino-style revenge plot as a frame for the adaptation before the war revived severe censorship in Russia.
When Putin launched his invasion two years ago, Lockshin opposed the war on social media from the United States and called on his friends to support Ukraine. Back in Russia, that put the movie’s release at risk.
“My position was that I wouldn’t censor myself in any way for the movie,” he said. “The movie itself is about censorship.”
Universal Pictures, which had signed on to distribute the film, pulled out of Russia after the war began and exited the project. (The movie currently has no distributor in the United States.)
They don’t quite get the irony, do they?
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Great book, will be interesting to see what happens.
But I prefer actually Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” to “Master Margarita” (as a Russian speaker would call the book). The former is a brilliant satire on the theme of the New Soviet Man, and is funny as hell as well as being bitterly sad. Would make a great animated film.
No US distributor for The Master of Margaritas? I don’t even want to live anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz8LjPqWsPcReplies: @HA, @Sorel McRae
Maybe it would be even less appropriate for American audiences than Russian ones.
Ya, Americans would not get it
There is an older film adaptation with English dubbing:
To paraphrase the internet personality, “It’s not censorship when we do it”.
The irony of the above quote from the NYT must be causing Bulgakov to chuckle, wherever he is off in the ether now.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.
Beginning to wonder if it's always possible for a film to ever really live up to a successful literature masterpiece, because, for the main reason being, a novel is verbal, and thus has to rely upon words to touch and stir the emotions as well as to paint the images in the brain thru descriptions, introspection, dialogue, etc. and so novels, which are books, are all done thru words.
Whereas first and foremost, film is visual and non-verbal. After all, for the first few decades of cinema, film was silent. After the Nickelodeon phase, cinema gradually rose to an art form; it became known as "motion pictures" (and not static words).
A picture is worth a thousand words, is the saying. So basically its best at times to ignore the words and watch the picture. The image paints on the cinematic canvas with images, first and foremost. What is felt, experienced, emoted, etc. is chiefly thru the image and not the words. Rather than reading pages upon pages of descriptions regarding a subject, say, war (e.g. Tolstoy's War and Peace), film, on the other hand, can just show it on the screen. And the point is made in seconds are several minutes.
It probably can be done (and has been done of course over the years) but ultimately, novels and film are both two different kinds of art form and communication, with one being chiefly verbal (if not entirely verbal), and the other primarily visual, with heavy borrowing from words to create the cinematic stories.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Buzz Mohawk
The novel Shane was the stuff of natural fascism: Shane was a strapping 6-feet tall, with dark hair, and was superhuman. Conversely, in the year of casting against type (1953; see Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity), the Super Chief, George Stevens, cast blonde, slender, 5’5” Alan Ladd as Shane, who in this incarnation was vulnerable. In the end, Shane, though victorious, has been wounded by a back-shooter, and his fate is ambiguous. He refuses to go back to the Starretts’ house for Marian to treat him, because it’s time to go, and Shane is one end of an unconsummated love triangle with Marian and Joe Starrett. And so, we get one of the most famous (and oft parodied) endings of all time, as little Joey Starrett implores him to come back.
The ending is so towering because Laddie plumbed previously untapped levels of talent, Vic Young’s music gave him a proper send-off, and little Brandon de Wilde was sensational as Little Joey.
And, of course, the Super Chief was at the peak of his powers.
In Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), Carl Foreman was working off John W. Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star,” which was no great shakes. However, Foreman had seen a brilliant, 20th Century Fox Henry King Western, The Gunfighter (1950), which had made the ticking clock a central motif. Time was running out on the eponymous protagonist, Jimmie Ringo (in a laughable attempt at uglying up the prettiest face in Hollywood, Greg Peck).
But in addition to a great comeback performance by Coop, and a brilliant script by Foreman, High Noon has an amazing theme song and score by Tiomkin, with lyrics by Ned Washington (which google's ai butchered, turning “or his’n” into “or his”), which set up the whole story in the first five minutes, thereby transcending pictures’ fundamental words/images conflict....Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
The story was so revoltingly bizarre—with a character missing fingers, because a vicious dog periodically bites them off—that my chief of research, who was reading aloud to me, only got to around page 50, before we both quit on it.
The picture is heartbreakingly beautiful, if uneven. The unevenness is due to the Finney Factor.
Albert Finney plays the protagonist, traveling salesman Edward Bloom, as a dying, old man, and he’s a grand, old ham. However, Ewan McGregor, who plays him as a young man, is very good, but not good enough. He’s just not large enough.
Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the love of Edward Bloom’s life, Sandra, as a coed, when he courts her, and as his middle-aged wife, Sandra.
In spite of my as yet unrequited love for Jessica Lange, the role that breaks your heart is that of Jenny, played by Hailey Anne Nelson, as an eight-year-old, and by Tim Burton’s lady love, Helena Bonham Carter, as a young and then middle-aged woman. (Carter also plays a witch.) Jenny falls in love with Edward when she’s eight, and he promises to wait for and return for her when she’s grown, but he’s late.
I see I’m not doing this masterpiece any sort of justice.
The story of Edward Bloom is a story of fantastical whimsy, a picaresque of a man who wanders from one adventure to another, of a magical town hidden from the world of barefoot folk, whose shoes have all been tossed onto telephone lines by a beautiful little girl, of underwater detours, of a circus impresario who is now man, now beast.
I had hoped that Big Fish would get Finney his Oscar, but it did poorly at the box office, and got only one nomination, for frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s moving score.
I haven’t seen it in a while, and must see it again.
(One inaccuracy is that Billy Crudup plays the protagonist’s literal-minded, ap reporter son. If only ap operatives were literal-minded! I’m looking at you, Tom Hays!)
Big Fish is a personal though hardly auto-biographical work for Burton, in which he shows how a story-teller starts out with reality, and embellishes on it.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
It’s a very good novel about a kidnapping, engineered by a self-styled criminal mastermind, in which everything goes wrong, which was published during the heyday of the heist movie.
Somebody passed along the novel by Lombino, better known as both Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, to Kurosawa, who identified with the protagonist, a man rich and powerful, but who started out at the bottom of the corporate ladder in the shoe business, and had to learn every job in the factory on the way up, just as Kurosawa, who had studied art, and then apprenticed as an assistant director, had to learn every job (save composer) involved in making a movie.
Kurosawa and his collaborators made a hybrid of a story of corporate chicanery and kidnapping with a Dr. Mabuse story. Kurosawa’s version (and vision), High and Low (1963), was a story of class hatred, and the role of intelligence and team work in society, and how they could outwit a diabolical criminal. Kurosawa also does amazing things with motion and spacing in consecutive scenes set in a jazz club and outside in a seemingly enclosed space of heroin addicts. It’s around #50 on my list of the 100 Greatest Pictures.
Spite Lee has announced that he plans to destroy High and Low this year in an unmake.
Perhaps there is some regression to the mean involved here. An average film derived from an above average book may seem like a let down. And it is mostly above average books that get filmed.
I also suspect people tend to prefer the version they are exposed to first.
After rereading Catch 22, which was unsuccessfully brought to film by Mike Nichols in 1973, I saw that George Clooney had done it as a mini-series in 2019. Watching the first episode, I realized it could never work. For example, one of the funniest scenes in the book is the argument between Yossarian and Col. Scheisskopf's wife, with whom he is having an affair, about God. The scene is funny in the book because of how long the argument goes on. They couldn't let it go on at such length in the movie, as it would eat up too much time, but by truncating it it is no longer memorable. Also a problem is that in the novel, the war serves mostly as a backdrop to the interplay of the eccentric characters and the absurd, paradox-laden dialogs between them. In film, you need to see action, so Clooney's mini-series focuses too much on the war itself, on events.
The film of The Road is as good as McCarthy's novel. The film Forrest Gump is much better than the novel which it was based. Kubrick's The Shining was better than Stephen King's novel, which King could never acknowledge, going so far as to authorize a more literal --and terrible--TV adaptation of his book.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @JimDandy
To get published in the NYT, one must be willing not merely to believe the lie, but to retail it, to broadcast it enthusiastically to demonstrate to the reader that one believes it. The gullible are convinced. The rational are simply instructed in what is an acceptable opinion.
To a rational man, it seems ironic. But it is better characterized as gaslighting.
Thessalonians 2:11-12 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
“when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.”
Beginning to wonder if it’s always possible for a film to ever really live up to a successful literature masterpiece, because, for the main reason being, a novel is verbal, and thus has to rely upon words to touch and stir the emotions as well as to paint the images in the brain thru descriptions, introspection, dialogue, etc. and so novels, which are books, are all done thru words.
Whereas first and foremost, film is visual and non-verbal. After all, for the first few decades of cinema, film was silent. After the Nickelodeon phase, cinema gradually rose to an art form; it became known as “motion pictures” (and not static words).
A picture is worth a thousand words, is the saying. So basically its best at times to ignore the words and watch the picture. The image paints on the cinematic canvas with images, first and foremost. What is felt, experienced, emoted, etc. is chiefly thru the image and not the words. Rather than reading pages upon pages of descriptions regarding a subject, say, war (e.g. Tolstoy’s War and Peace), film, on the other hand, can just show it on the screen. And the point is made in seconds are several minutes.
It probably can be done (and has been done of course over the years) but ultimately, novels and film are both two different kinds of art form and communication, with one being chiefly verbal (if not entirely verbal), and the other primarily visual, with heavy borrowing from words to create the cinematic stories.
Just, films are motion pictures with music and words combined. And most verbal passages cannot be filmed- especially if they include ideas. Try to adapt Biblical "Ecclesiastes" to the screen. Then, even without ideas, words' arrangement may convey something that one cannot put on the screen.
Take the penultimate chapter ending of Flaubert's "Sentimental Education", when old & crushed lovers part, leaving us with their unconsumed love and unlived lives"And this was all"- as the final anticlimactic climax cannot be filmed.
Simply, a novel/story has much more developed language to convey almost everything, unlike film language.
Except visual action & that's why Jaws, for instance, is better than the book. Because to see all that shark jaw-jawing is not the same as to read about it.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Film director Stanley Kubrick chose science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate with in the early-mid 1960s. Kubric, high off his great success with Dr. Strangelove, wanted to make a great science fiction film.
Clarke agreed and the two collaborated on the story. The result was a historic film and a book.
To quote from Wikipedia:"
The truth is: Kubrick's film is much more layered, mysterious and has yielded decades of deep analysis, while Clarke's book pretty much is taken as literal, which it is.
There is no better example of the difference between film and literature.
Now...let's see how long it takes this comment to be approved and to appear publicly so you can read it.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
Most censorship in the West is perpetrated by a networked cabal of Jewish oligarchs who bought up or otherwise control the vast majority of American and, by extension, global media. Recently, Putin bemoaned this fact, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, saying that it didn’t really matter whatever truths he speaks because Western media’s “reach” trumps his “speech” and thus he could never win a propaganda war against “American controlled” media – which is true – except that it’s not really “Americans” who control the global media but Jews who do. They also control the American government, both directly by occupying key nodes in the cabinet, judiciary and deep state, but also indirectly through their control over voters’ minds and therefore who gets elected.
It’s bizarre and tragic that the Jews were allowed to gain control of American media, particularly television: “ABC (Leonard Goldenson), CBS (William Samuel Paley) and NBC (David Sarnoff)”.[1] Once these Jews gained control of media they gained control of the American mind – and thereby the whole Western world.
Presumably if they’d been challenged on antitrust grounds SCOTUS would have thrown the case out because “they have three different owners” and thus “don’t form a monopoly.” While it’s true that they were controlled by three different men (Goldenson, Paley and Sarnoff) all three men belonged to the same tiny tribe and pushed the same tribal interests at the expense of the 98% of the rest of the population. We’re seeing the consequences of their control play out in the world today with, for example, the complete emasculation of white Christendom against the threat of mass immigration and its total unquestioning support of the supremacist ethnostate of Israel even though such support is entirely contrary to American interests (and purported “values” such as the “evils of ethnostates”) – not to mention objective morality.
Antitrust laws which fail to factor in ethnic cartelization by greenbeard ethnic nepotists are toothless in the face of tribal peoples like Jews.
Why do white gentiles fail to grasp that other groups – tribal groups like Jews and Indian Subcontinentals – are just different than them, and that that their laws must be adapted to account for these differences? Part of the reason they continue fail to grasp this is that it’s a fact the recognition of which has been rendered taboo by Jewish media itself.
Of course, Jews don’t necessarily need to directly own media to exert influence over it. Just witness the sad case of Elon Musk who, after initially promising free speech on X and that “all legal speech would be permitted” has recently buckled under Jewish pressure and under demands that Jews be given special treatment. He has thus reneged on all his free speech promises to satisfy ethnic activists like Bill Ackman and Jonathan Greenblatt.
Jewish media ownership is at the absolute heart of all of the West’s problems. It’s why nobody can even discuss what those problems are. Jewish media control should be the central focus of everyone who desires to save the West from its impending destruction. It should also be the central focus of everyone who seeks to rescue the Palestinians and bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East.
[1] https://www.unz.com/estriker/americas-church-the-invention-of-the-evangelical-christian-movement/
Here’s a link to the trailer:
I ran about a dozen of the comments through a translator. They’re overwhelmingly positive and apolitical.
Not only is Russian media far far more open than western media, but Russian viewers are far better informed and far better able to identify obvious lies.
There is an argument that it is the US and European viewer that has destroyed the value of Western News.
How is Russia free? If you’re a homosexual you are persecuted.
Are you upset that you can’t be racist without consequences?
That says more about you than anything.Replies: @Stripes Duncan
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62VjI3ONTxwI ran about a dozen of the comments through a translator. They're overwhelmingly positive and apolitical.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks, I’ll post it.
This should be a favorite topic here. End of the road for natural diamonds?
https://archive.is/FFpDW
Noteworthy that few Jews remain in the rough diamond trading market in Anterwerp. They have been replaced by Jains. I wonder if that will help contribute to the end of natural diamonds. Nicky Oppenheimer is still a major shareholder of the parent company of De Beers.
For a riper display, have a look at The Collapse of US Media Is Accelerating Our Political Crisis (Chris Hedges • February 17, 2024), a 7,400 word, clueless dialogue between Establishment alumni about people looking outside the Overton window and seeing “fake news,” “conspiracy theories,” etc.
Mr. Unz put it up as a Featured Article for a while. I suspect that he knew it would go over like a piñata.
Curious if all the chimps who wanted to sh!t all over Gravity’s Rainbow in the other thread are the same chimps willing to fight to the death for “Master and Margarita”, which is essentially unfilmable, becuz oh noes! Putinhitler Russian authoritarianism is bad!#$@*’
Lookit, if you really want a good inside critique of Stalinism, then read Nadezhda Mandelstam, “Hope Against Hope.” Or la goddess Akhmatova. Or even Gerhardie, FFS. Meantime, for all his capricious occasional broad-minded-ness, Stalin remains the guy who had Vsevolod Meyerhold tortured and killed for no reason.
* * *
OT, but not being a sports-watching guy, I nevertheless got dragged to a hockey-watching party for the big Rangers/Islanders stadium game, which I must admit was epic in its way. Astounded they actually filled the whole stadium, when hockey is a game which usually only fills MSG roughly 30k.
Anyway for me, battle-scarred avant-gardist that I am, was a commercial which used as its soundtrack “I’ll Be Your Mirror” from the ferociously avant super-group The Velvet Underground. Couldn’t believe me ears: that is HOW f#cking old I am.
Not a sports guy at all, in fact an anti-sports guy, but when I was a kid for weird sociological reasons I got dragged into playing pretty much every sport — even boxing!#! — and even though I totally sucked at every single one of ’em, at least I can say I did it. My favorite torture was ice hockey, which I got dragooned into doing at 3 AM at Sky Rink pickup games courtesy of my older brother who was an athletic star, who insisted that the geeky nerd come along and play because it would “build character”. Which I still do not possess.
Anyway of all the dopey team sports, aside from baseball which is sublime and more on the level of chess, I think ice hockey is the best: the elegance and precision of ballet, the technological (skating/stick handling) fury of NASA, and the brute zaniness of kick-boxing, all without the dumb grandiosity of bakkaball. Plus, buncha white guys for a friggin’ change.
Daniil Kharms wrote beautifully during her that period and paid with his life.Replies: @MGB
Sicne I think that Sympathy for the Devil is the best Stones-song
I’d love to know more about it.
A musician who worked with the Stones and whom I spoke to about Sympathy For The Devil said: Jagger scribbled maybe a few words about this stuff on a piece of paper. But the song was written by a mule – a hired hand…
As I said: I would love to know more about this subject.
(A phantsy of mine: Tom Stoppard helped the Stones out with the lyrics…).
Charlie Watts (the drummer) was interviewed about it years later, and he said basically: Mick wrote the thing as a ballad on an acoustic guitar, but then we knocked the hell out of ourselves trying to figure out how to record it -- we tried it as R n B, as punk rock, as classical, as big-band jazz, we tried everything, but nothing was working, but we still had faith in the song. Finally in frustration at 4 in the morning, I put down this sort of samba beat, and everybody said That's it! That's how it works!
Yeah I know that whole 4 in the morning thing.Replies: @Dieter Kief
But I prefer actually Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” to “Master Margarita” (as a Russian speaker would call the book). The former is a brilliant satire on the theme of the New Soviet Man, and is funny as hell as well as being bitterly sad. Would make a great animated film.Replies: @Matthew Kelly, @russianguy, @MGB, @Jack D
Also works equally as well as a satire of all these blank-slatists/nurture-extremists who insist they can get all the races of the world to behave as well as Western Europeans with the just-right incantations of Science! (which will happen any day now; just a few more trillion dollars more please k thx).
Putin is a 2-bit dictator who fails to grasp the fundamental GREATNESS of some aspects of Russian culture.
He thinks “the West” is whatever faggotry gets pushed by the EU/WEF/NGO/LGBT nexus.
Putin apologists fail to grasp that he is a fundamental LOSER who does not play to win.
Time off for a moment.
Ladies and gentlemen, for your dining and dancing pleasure: the incomparable Cat Valentine!
“Oh my god! A litterbox that plays classical music!”
Beat that.
Also notice how the presence of Black Guy always makes everything less funny. Diversity after all is our greatest strength, even in anti-comedy.
It’s almost unbelievable how slavishly American Communists bowed to every one of Stalin’s wishes. We are talking about a substantial number of people who were very active. They were traitors in every sense of the word. That story has not been fully told.
Can you connect the dots now?
There is an argument that it is the US and European viewer that has destroyed the value of Western News.Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @Ebony Obelisk, @fish
Modern Russian viewers are no more competent than European viewers. Some Russian friends of mine who just moved to Serbia said they were surprised at the amount of regime bullshit they had accepted uncritically when they lived in Russia, and they had believed they were “critical thinkers”. Russian media is mostly a cesspool of careerists. And, like in the West, most people don’t care and try to live their private lives far away from the media.
All Orthodox & Muslim cultures share:
a) pre-rational public discourse, mythological approach & logical impotence
b) emo blather in public talk, even among academicians
c) disregard for empirical facts
d) collective psychological immaturity & infantile world-view
With or without censorship, both academics & garbage collectors.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @AndrewR
I'd love to know more about it.
A musician who worked with the Stones and whom I spoke to about Sympathy For The Devil said: Jagger scribbled maybe a few words about this stuff on a piece of paper. But the song was written by a mule - a hired hand...
As I said: I would love to know more about this subject.
(A phantsy of mine: Tom Stoppard helped the Stones out with the lyrics...).Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @The Germ Theory of Disease
The music is pretty simple. It’s 4 chords, and the funky bass line, which together with the bongos really makes the song, seems to have been a product of Keith fooling around in the studio. I don’t know if Ry Cooder tries to take credit for this song, but it is a rare Stones hit that isn’t actually guitar riff driven.
There is an argument that it is the US and European viewer that has destroyed the value of Western News.Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @Ebony Obelisk, @fish
Do you actually believe this? What planet do you live on?
How is Russia free? If you’re a homosexual you are persecuted.
Are you upset that you can’t be racist without consequences?
That says more about you than anything.
An absolutely overrated good novel. Whenever you encounter “cult classics”, beware. M & M became famous because it was written in a relatively digestible modern(ist) manner & it had a few “philosophical” themes, so it was hailed as a novelty in comparison with dreary socialist realism products.
But, this novel doesn’t have much to offer to the heart & mind; its satire is a mild one; existentially- quasiphilosophically, it’s weak.
I understand its status as a cult classic, but it is simply a good novel which is inferior to the best work of Leonid Leonov, who sank himself with his lapdoggery to Stalin.
On top of that- satirical novels don’t age well.
Candide is 275-odd years old, and I still "get it". Not sure if my kids would, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CandideReplies: @Bardon Kaldian
Is this true? I mean was the Russian invasion “full scale” as to the Ukraine? It seems to me that the invasion was directed at disputed provinces in Eastern Ukraine which were part of the Russian Empire at one time, not an invasion of the whole of the Ukraine which would have made the invasion “full scale.” I think you can argue about the legitimacy of the “disputed” part without falsely stating that the Russian invasion was “full scale.”
I’m assuming that the author is either ignorant, imprecise, or both.
Reply: Jack D, Jack D, HA, Jack D
Agree: Johann Ricke
Mad Face: Corvirus
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
I'm assuming that the author is either ignorant, imprecise, or both.Replies: @Cagey Beast, @hhsiii, @William Badwhite, @Jack D
They say “full-scale invasion” because they want to be consistent with their previous claim that the uprisings in Donbass and Crimea in 2014 were also Russian invasions. They’re not entirely wrong but they insist on the point for a reason: they want people to think the Euromaidan coup was popular throughout Ukraine and was attacked from outside by Putin.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
There a very few perfect adaptations of novels to films – Howard’s End, Being There and a French language Madame Bovary I saw ages ago come to mind.
The Hunger Games spectacularly brought those novels to life.
But it is rare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdRkhzDmxvY
Or take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ending.
The Star-child scene is idiotic.
We are to believe that the guy was transformed into some kind of star-god who has will & paraphysical powers. And this is- a star. With a developed fetus inside (at least, that’s how we know that this transformed guy has become a humanoid super-physical star). Can you get more nonsensical than that? Stars are just stars. There is nothing within, or around them, that is remotely human, or “alive” (any form of life imaginable included). Stars have no will, intelligence, identity, power, … nothing.
I get that Kubrick/Clarke wanted that guy to undergo transformation into a god-like supra-physical being transcending ordinary 3+1 universe. I understand their intention & accept it. But: a) this is not supra-physical existence, Star-child being some extremely weird star in physical universe, b) fetal phase is ultimately comical, c) they should have presented some kind of god-like being our guy has become outside of space-time & acting on it from beyond & “above”, d) the fetal stuff makes it all hilarious. He should have become a hyper- humanoid being with traces of humanity, but, basically- a god beyond space-time.So, this legendary scene is, in my view, completely botched.
They failed, but the public & reviewers were just transfixed by unexpectedness, so they uncritically accepted this anti-climax as the climax.
An author more intelligent than Clarke/Kubrick would have ended it better.Replies: @Anon, @Yngvar
There are no European viewers, just different national cultures. In Russia, the general trend is that of a serious, grim monolithic world-view with the audience mostly supporting & others weakly opposing the official narrative. In Serbia you mentioned- their national culture is a combination of clownish farce combined with uncritical uniformity of myth-based uncritical stance towards all national myths. So, one can make fun of everything & everyone, but virtually all are firmly anchored in mythological national delusional garbage.
All Orthodox & Muslim cultures share:
a) pre-rational public discourse, mythological approach & logical impotence
b) emo blather in public talk, even among academicians
c) disregard for empirical facts
d) collective psychological immaturity & infantile world-view
With or without censorship, both academics & garbage collectors.
(Well, the latter recycle, too. Academia once did as well, but now it's all deconstruction.)
An interesting question: Will the movie be distributed in Ukraine and what will be the reactions? Being forced to fight for your government or at least to eat the fruits of war ist an eye-opener and creates some cynicism in the population.
But I prefer actually Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” to “Master Margarita” (as a Russian speaker would call the book). The former is a brilliant satire on the theme of the New Soviet Man, and is funny as hell as well as being bitterly sad. Would make a great animated film.Replies: @Matthew Kelly, @russianguy, @MGB, @Jack D
Wouldn’t a Russian speaker know it as Master and Margarita?
That’s Roger Ebert, concluding his review of the American remake (1993) of the European version (1991). Americans would have to view a different version of “The Master and Margarita.” Sure, American wokeness and censorship are factors that would require adjusting the movie. But the main adjust-the-movie factor is the more limited ability of Americans to grasp aspects and features of a movie. I agree with Ebert that this gap exists. I don’t know why it does, but neither did Ebert (“I simply know…”) Even well-educated Americans seem to have a blind spot here. (And not only doctors.) We don’t suffer from this, but we are Men of Unz.
I'm assuming that the author is either ignorant, imprecise, or both.Replies: @Cagey Beast, @hhsiii, @William Badwhite, @Jack D
There was fighting near Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, etc, if anything you can read about the war is true, so there was a northern aspect of the invasion, too. You may think it was all a feint. By full-scale he’s probably referring to more than just limited assistance war going on in the East since 2014.
The original version was shown in the U.S. I saw it with a friend in New York, and a guy sitting near us had a panic attack.
Haven’t read any Bulgakov.
But when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have thought I’d end up in an America with show trials, continual black is white/up is down propaganda, promotion of crime and riots, engineered elections, arbitrary detention, endless lawfare, routine firing for voicing contra-narrative opinions, continual lawfare, ludicrous civil judgements and/or criminal charges for simply speaking in one’s defense, the lawfare against the lawyers who defend you … the sort of totalitarianism found in the books and plays we read for school.
And that’s just for breakfast. Lunch is denying sexual dimorphism, family, fertility. And dinner is normalizing open genocidal population replacement.
It’s time for Steve–and “conservative” politicians and people–to get off the whole “when will these people wake up and ‘see’ that they’re the ones doing bad things”. They are not “waking up” to the irony. They have their ideology. They believe it. They are enforcing it … on us–and destroying our nation, our civilization, the West.
As in 1776–only more so–it is time for separation.
New York's convicted Donald Trump for a "crime" that exists under New York law but in no other state, i.e., he was convicted of fraud for overvaluing (in the state's opinion) the value of real estate on a loan application despite the fact that a.) the lender does not consider the value the borrower states in deciding whether to make the loan and b.) the lender said Trump's assets were sufficient to assure them he would repay it, which he did. He was convicted of fraud although no fraud occurred.Hochul was telling other businessmen not to worry because this obscure law, with which no one has previously been charged under such circumstances, is being used only against Donald Trump. It is a sort of Bill of Attainder. No one who is not Donald Trump need worry. Only, how can they not worry when a state supports this level of corruption? Watch more corporations move to safer climes.Replies: @Prester John, @SafeNow, @Joe Joe
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
“But the film was on its way to the box office long before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times. ”
I would be interested to hear actual Russian citizens give their accounts of the level of oppression there. I certainly don’t take the word of some glib movie reviewer who looks like Will Stencil in 20 years.
“So Stalin, a more complicated figure than in Trotskyite legend, ”
Yeah, I bet most psychopathic paranoid genocidal megalomaniacs are! But hey, Buffalo Bill was an animal lover!
But when I was a kid, I wouldn't have thought I'd end up in an America with show trials, continual black is white/up is down propaganda, promotion of crime and riots, engineered elections, arbitrary detention, endless lawfare, routine firing for voicing contra-narrative opinions, continual lawfare, ludicrous civil judgements and/or criminal charges for simply speaking in one's defense, the lawfare against the lawyers who defend you ... the sort of totalitarianism found in the books and plays we read for school.
And that's just for breakfast. Lunch is denying sexual dimorphism, family, fertility. And dinner is normalizing open genocidal population replacement.
It's time for Steve--and "conservative" politicians and people--to get off the whole "when will these people wake up and 'see' that they're the ones doing bad things". They are not "waking up" to the irony. They have their ideology. They believe it. They are enforcing it ... on us--and destroying our nation, our civilization, the West.
As in 1776--only more so--it is time for separation.Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Muggles
ludicrous civil judgements
New York’s convicted Donald Trump for a “crime” that exists under New York law but in no other state, i.e., he was convicted of fraud for overvaluing (in the state’s opinion) the value of real estate on a loan application despite the fact that a.) the lender does not consider the value the borrower states in deciding whether to make the loan and b.) the lender said Trump’s assets were sufficient to assure them he would repay it, which he did. He was convicted of fraud although no fraud occurred.
Hochul was telling other businessmen not to worry because this obscure law, with which no one has previously been charged under such circumstances, is being used only against Donald Trump. It is a sort of Bill of Attainder. No one who is not Donald Trump need worry. Only, how can they not worry when a state supports this level of corruption? Watch more corporations move to safer climes.
I doubt there would be that much interest. In a nation where people go to watch insipid comic book movies, I would be surprised if 3.7 million people would go to this film.
Even without the war, a Russian filmed novel adaptation dubbed/subtitled into English is a tough sell in the American market. Films like this play in like three art house movie theaters in coastal blue cities for a week, even under favorable circumstances. And right now circumstances are not favorable.
So the Men of Unz trying to make something out of this – “Ooh, Russia is better than America. Grocery prices are lower AND there is less censorship” are Putin’s useful idiots, as usual.
Fortunately, this is 2024 and there are all sorts of streaming platforms, etc. so you don’t have to move to the Upper West Side to see a movie like this if you are one of the 3 people in America who actually wants to see it.
iSteve and the NYT excerpt here don't bother to tell us anything about the actual plot other than it is anti censorship written during the Stalin period.
But why is this important now, to us? Don't we already hate censorship? In what way does this plot as filmed resonate to modern American audiences today?
It may be more important that current Russian audiences relate to it, as Putin is ruthlessly censoring any popular outlets of criticism in Russia today of his main project: invading a neighboring nation.
That point gets ignored by Putin apologists and fanboys.
Killing or banning actual political opponents and shutting down opposition political parties and news outlets is what Putin is doing right now. Ironically, supposed libertarian outlets like LewRockwell.com publish Russian propaganda and apologia for the invasion. They seem to live in the past circa 1980 when the US was the main global hegemon power. Putin advocates a return to Czarist Russia. And uses tanks to get it. America's global military reach is increasingly unpopular here.
Since this new film is in Russian, it would be expensive to translate/dub for American audiences. Since the plot is based on a 90 year old foreign nation context which few Americans now care about, why is this film so important today? What are the plot points?
Modern American (and Euorpean) Woke academia and intelligensia ruthlessly push censorship and cancelation of opposing viewpoints and their advocates. What they lack is the all powerful secret police and gulags. The FBI and Jan. 6 demonstrator federal prisons are only soft imitations of those. Firing opinion columnists and dissident journalists is just losing a good job, not the end of normal life.
A modern American version of this film might be wonderful. As it is, as Jack D notes, probably just an art house project which won't get funded. It might make NYT censors look bad...
That's just not true. Every major metropolitan area will have two or three venues playing foreign films. Russian films aren't likely to be popular right now but M & M will seem to be controversial so it will be shown everywhere art films are played. Why are you making things up?
“Universal Pictures, which had signed on to distribute the film, pulled out of Russia after the war began and exited the project. (The movie currently has no distributor in the United States.)”
American censorship is mostly privatized. And since the private sector is generally more efficient than the government sector, American censorship is about as good as it gets in terms of its stealth and effectiveness. Lest you disagree, the proof is in the pudding. Indeed, few people on Earth are, in general, more ignorant about how the world works than Americans.
Score by Jimmy Buffett? His buddy can distribute it:
American movie producers have always understood movie making to be a BUSINESS. American movie making is not art, it’s not propaganda, its not anything except a PRODUCT. A very successful product, one that has been sold all over the planet for a century. One that is so appealing that it is attractive to both Communist and Fascist dictators. (Hitler, Mao and Stalin both loved Hollywood movies – Hitler was a big Mickey Mouse fan. Mao loved Bruce Lee.)
The best way to sell a mass market product is to make it appealing to the maximum # of people. If you are selling breakfast cereal and you want to introduce a new flavor of say, fish flavored breakfast cereal (“Loxola”), you test market it and see whether consumers like it. It doesn’t matter if elite food critics like the concept or they like it in France. You have to get ordinary Americans to shell out for the product.
The movie business operates the same way. You have to bring the product to the audience, not vice versa. Are Americans philistines who are too primitive to understand the beauty of fish flavored breakfast cereal and prefer sugary stuff instead? Maybe, but they are what they are and the people who make movies know what they are and know that trying to force feed them something that they don’t like is a waste of $.
Have you been keeping up, Jack? Look at the Marvel and Star Wars movies that in the name of wokeness are giving a big FU to their natural fan base and are flopping at the box office.Replies: @HA, @Anonymous
How about people like a story, good guys and bad guys, action, romance, thrills and chills, maybe some violence and some steamy sex ... and Hollyweird serves that up packed with their minoritarian propaganda?
~
I think the role of Hollyweird in the decline of the West is way under-appreciated. Peddling the minoritarian narrative, but peddling it with pictures that seem to our brains like reality and zip past our "could be bullshit" filter have for verbal communication with strangers.
In the before time, people in any culture got their information, ideas and pictures of the world from their family and community--from people who perhaps even loved and wanted what was best for them, but certainly "on their side" in terms of the survival of the nation's people and culture.
Turns out having people get their stories--much less through modern visual media--from a hostile minority outgroup who are not on their side is a really, really, really bad idea.Replies: @Anonymous
https://www.unz.com/isteve/freeways/#comment-6420145Replies: @Jack D
Putin … imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times.
We’ve been living in Margaritaville since 2015, when our Masters came out in the open.
American movie producers have always understood movie making to be a BUSINESS. American movie making is not art, it’s not propaganda, its not anything except a PRODUCT.
Have you been keeping up, Jack? Look at the Marvel and Star Wars movies that in the name of wokeness are giving a big FU to their natural fan base and are flopping at the box office.
This is a YouTube playlist of The Master and Margarita audiobook. It’s one of the best performances I know of:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-lY2fdb59Of61NGdOmXUagd0f1B_RUXC
What’s even clearer is Belarus got banned from the Eurovision Song Contest because it’s a contest by national broadcasters and during the boarder spat between Poland and Belarus (Wherein we were told to simultaneously curse the Belarusians for their aggression but also Poland needed to let the invaders Belarus let in so they could heroically cross into Germany and other nice North West European states, none would stay in Poland. So it’s awful what they are doing but we need to let them do it to us!) that the Belarusian broadcaster was guilty of being a propagandist. (Unlike the Polish one. Or indeed all the national broadcasters following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How the BBC continues to be allowed in after it’s poor showing in Iraq remains unknown. I haven’t watched a minute of their coverage of Gaza but no doubt it is also going to look very bad in retrospect.)
Russia wasn’t banned from the EBU but it was soft banned from the Eurovision by it being suggested it wasn’t “constructive” for them to compete. They haven’t been back since.
Meanwhile both Azerbaijan and Israel have been engaged in open conquest and ethnic cleansing of the ancient native peoples of territories under their occupation and nothing happens. (Adding insult to injury when the first war took place Azerbaijan was back at the Eurovision but Armenia couldn’t even go because their state broadcaster had a budget problem after the war) Indeed a way to make Turks and Azeris mad would be to make the comparison of both them and Israel having psychopathic national identities based on exterminating the native peoples of lands they deem belong to them by virtue of always being inhabited by the people they deem their destiny to conquer and exterminate. (Greeks, Armenians and Palestinians, respectively)
Who/whom. It’s all been one big neocon war. There was never any doubt the minute you provoke and extend the war in Ukraine that things would kick off in the Middle East. How everything Israeli isn’t radioactive right now is something nobody will believe in the future. They never know how to behave, just overreach causing a backlash with the only lesson they learn being they weren’t crazy enough the last time.
It’s all the same war. On Russia, on Palestine, on you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz8LjPqWsPcReplies: @HA, @Sorel McRae
“There is an older film adaptation with English dubbing:”
Back when Netflix actually mailed out DVD’s, I had that on my queue for years (I generally dislike overdubbed foreign films, since the chosen overdub voices always seem so wrong), but for whatever reason, it was always unavailable. I see that Behemoth is actually a man in a cat-suit — I was curious how they’d try to get around that.
Have you been keeping up, Jack? Look at the Marvel and Star Wars movies that in the name of wokeness are giving a big FU to their natural fan base and are flopping at the box office.Replies: @HA, @Anonymous
“Look at the Marvel and Star Wars movies that in the name of wokeness are [snubbing] their natural fan base and are flopping at the box office.”
That seems to be happening in other realms as well:
Got that? It’s not wokeness that is reducing the number of whites, oh, no — it’s actually partisan Reupblican complaints about wokeness that are reducing the number of whites. (And also, it seems that not being a fat druggie is disproportionately difficult for white people, as opposed to to all those trim, drug-free Adonises we see among other ethnic groups.)
I'm assuming that the author is either ignorant, imprecise, or both.Replies: @Cagey Beast, @hhsiii, @William Badwhite, @Jack D
It is similar to how there is no conservative, only “ultra conservative” or “arch conservative”. There is no right, only “far right”. What Russia launched in (the) Ukraine can only be referred to as “full scale”. There is no other kind of invasion.
Reply: Jack D, Jack D, HA, Jack D
Agree: Johann Ricke
Mad Face: Corvirus
I think it, more or less, used to work that way but as Michael Medved noted more than 30 years ago in “Hollywood vs. America” and elsewhere, it no longer does. Medved pointed out that ‘family films’ tend to do boffo box office but are consistently rejected by Studios in favor of more ‘edgy’ fare. Say what you will about Samuel Goldwyn but he wasn’t one to leave hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk to curry favor with the Left.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
Don’t worry, unless you’re Russian, the chance you’ll enjoy this novel is 0.1%. The chance you’ll come away thinking it’s a “great” or “important” work is maybe a bit higher.
I’m not Russian myself BTW. I am somewhat culturally Russified, having studied Russian in college and in the 40+ years since then read — even enjoyed — a fair number of Russian works. But Master and Margarita is just too weird for me. I predict it’ll be too weird for you too. If I’m wrong, I hope you’ll comment here about why you liked it.
Heart of a Dog is also a great book that remains relevant.
Stalin really liked Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins" which is based on his novel "The White Guard" which is about Ukraine. well worth reading.
The issue I would have with a movie about Master and Margarita, it really should be a mini-series.Replies: @MGB, @HA
There is an argument that it is the US and European viewer that has destroyed the value of Western News.Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @Ebony Obelisk, @fish
……but Russian viewers are far better informed and far better able to identify obvious lies.
Seventy years of prolefeed will do that to ya……
New York's convicted Donald Trump for a "crime" that exists under New York law but in no other state, i.e., he was convicted of fraud for overvaluing (in the state's opinion) the value of real estate on a loan application despite the fact that a.) the lender does not consider the value the borrower states in deciding whether to make the loan and b.) the lender said Trump's assets were sufficient to assure them he would repay it, which he did. He was convicted of fraud although no fraud occurred.Hochul was telling other businessmen not to worry because this obscure law, with which no one has previously been charged under such circumstances, is being used only against Donald Trump. It is a sort of Bill of Attainder. No one who is not Donald Trump need worry. Only, how can they not worry when a state supports this level of corruption? Watch more corporations move to safer climes.Replies: @Prester John, @SafeNow, @Joe Joe
Bottom line: Trump was a threat to the oligarchs and their media mouthpieces. Their party of choice, the Democrats, run the show. That other party doesn’t even count anymore. The late Sam Francis was right when he called them “the Stupid Party.” Long before Trump came on the scene this country sold its collective soul to the ruling class who promised The Great Unwashed lots of free stuff and endless “rights.”
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
You’ll see the film reach America if it can somehow be marketed and reviewed as a “wickedly clever take-down of Trump”
Really? I loved the book and am a big fan of Behemoth! It is a satire that still works today since it is about competing, stupid elites who peddle nonsense for personal gain, just like now!
Heart of a Dog is also a great book that remains relevant.
Stalin really liked Bulgakov’s play “Days of the Turbins” which is based on his novel “The White Guard” which is about Ukraine. well worth reading.
The issue I would have with a movie about Master and Margarita, it really should be a mini-series.
Master and Margarita is not about a Muscovite bartender who travels to Mexico to learn the secrets of tequila and the Worm, encounters Sam Peckinpah who wants to drag him into yet another Mexican revolution, and then returns home from his adventure where he becomes a big success and falls in love? If not, why not? Irony and satire attracts near zero audiences. It’s smartass crap. Knock it off.
How dare those frogs notice the rise in temperature before the water boils!?
Beginning to wonder if it's always possible for a film to ever really live up to a successful literature masterpiece, because, for the main reason being, a novel is verbal, and thus has to rely upon words to touch and stir the emotions as well as to paint the images in the brain thru descriptions, introspection, dialogue, etc. and so novels, which are books, are all done thru words.
Whereas first and foremost, film is visual and non-verbal. After all, for the first few decades of cinema, film was silent. After the Nickelodeon phase, cinema gradually rose to an art form; it became known as "motion pictures" (and not static words).
A picture is worth a thousand words, is the saying. So basically its best at times to ignore the words and watch the picture. The image paints on the cinematic canvas with images, first and foremost. What is felt, experienced, emoted, etc. is chiefly thru the image and not the words. Rather than reading pages upon pages of descriptions regarding a subject, say, war (e.g. Tolstoy's War and Peace), film, on the other hand, can just show it on the screen. And the point is made in seconds are several minutes.
It probably can be done (and has been done of course over the years) but ultimately, novels and film are both two different kinds of art form and communication, with one being chiefly verbal (if not entirely verbal), and the other primarily visual, with heavy borrowing from words to create the cinematic stories.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Buzz Mohawk
Generally true.
Just, films are motion pictures with music and words combined. And most verbal passages cannot be filmed- especially if they include ideas. Try to adapt Biblical “Ecclesiastes” to the screen. Then, even without ideas, words’ arrangement may convey something that one cannot put on the screen.
Take the penultimate chapter ending of Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education”, when old & crushed lovers part, leaving us with their unconsumed love and unlived lives
“And this was all”- as the final anticlimactic climax cannot be filmed.
Simply, a novel/story has much more developed language to convey almost everything, unlike film language.
Except visual action & that’s why Jaws, for instance, is better than the book. Because to see all that shark jaw-jawing is not the same as to read about it.
I'm assuming that the author is either ignorant, imprecise, or both.Replies: @Cagey Beast, @hhsiii, @William Badwhite, @Jack D
That’s ridiculous quibbling. The Russians assembled an army of over 200,000 men and send forces across their entire common border (including that of Putin’s ally, Belarus) as well as attacking by sea and air. What more could they have done to make it qualify as a “full scale” invasion in your book?
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).
I'm certainly no military man, but it appears that the Russians were trying for a quick knock-out blow with their assault on Kiev. Presumably to install a puppet regime and negotiate a favorable peace.
After getting beat up a lot worse than they counted on, the Russians seem to have retrenched to more limited war aims - just digesting the Donbass and perhaps enough territory to link up with Crimea on the western side of the Sea of Azov.
Neither government is going to win on terms that they would like, so they should just make peace already. However, neither government cares about the welfare of their own people, so I don't expect that to happen.
Why does the NYT need to add the modifier "full scale"? What's the quibbling distinction between a regular "invasion" and "full scale" one? Are they really sure it wasn't a 3/4 or 4/5 scale invasion?
This is one reason why the NYT is unreadably annoying. Whatever they are writing about is just an excuse for a labored effort to recite certain propaganda terms while making equally labored efforts to avoid using direct but inconvenient words.
For Round 2 in 2003 it still brought half a million men - over twice the number Putin sent into Ukraine in 2022.Replies: @HA
A "full scale invasion" would be accompanied with some plan for an occupation of the entire nation being invaded. A "limited scale invasion" would consist of grabbing some land but not the whole and claiming it for the invading nation.
But I prefer actually Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” to “Master Margarita” (as a Russian speaker would call the book). The former is a brilliant satire on the theme of the New Soviet Man, and is funny as hell as well as being bitterly sad. Would make a great animated film.Replies: @Matthew Kelly, @russianguy, @MGB, @Jack D
I prefer Master over Heart of a Dog, but I am ambivalent about the Pontius Pilate plot thread in Master. The way I read the Russian plot, with the well-spoken, but heavily accented Russian of Woland, is as a critique of the naive and easily corrupted Soviet elite, outwitted by the spell cast by Western currency being dangled before them by agents of global capitalism. Reminds me of Armand Hammer and others’ ‘philanthropic’ efforts in the civil war and immediate post-civil war era of the Soviet Union. See also, for example, Rockefeller Foundation penetration of Soviet medical universities and creation of programs aiming to train Soviet doctors abroad in the 1920s.
But, this novel doesn't have much to offer to the heart & mind; its satire is a mild one; existentially- quasiphilosophically, it's weak.
I understand its status as a cult classic, but it is simply a good novel which is inferior to the best work of Leonid Leonov, who sank himself with his lapdoggery to Stalin.
On top of that- satirical novels don't age well.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @anonymous
“satirical novels don’t age well”
Candide is 275-odd years old, and I still “get it”. Not sure if my kids would, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide
Bulgakov's novel is chockful of tiresome fantasies, descriptive passages & cultural-historical references that, even when one recognizes them, leave one indifferent. It has no memorable 3-dimensional characters (they're all grotesques); no dramatic situations one could take as imaginary-real (unlike Kafka's "Metamorphosis"- which is, in my opinion, also overrated, but not as much as M & M); no incisive critique of what it means to live in a truly totalitarian regime.
In sum, all fictions heavily relying on allegory & fantasy ultimately lose at the end. They fizzle.
The same can be said of supposedly canonical "Gravity's Rainbow" which is, judging from a distance, not more than a display of virtuosity without substance.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
“The Russians assembled an army of over 200,000 men and send forces across their entire common border (including that of Putin’s ally, Belarus) as well as attacking by sea and air. “
Anatoly Karlin was predicting a whole lot of “shock and awe” (a forecast of which he has since ruefully repented). And the only reason that the Russians didn’t pile on even more men was because Moscow thought that the numbers they had were already at overkill levels. The US was giving the Ukrainians about a week before Kyiv would fall. Russian generals were booking Kyiv restaurants for victory dinners and bringing victory parade uniforms along with them, while so-called Russians with attitude were predicting that was more than would be needed.
Suffice it to say it didn’t turn out that way.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
When virtually single media outlet insists on using the exact same term it looks like enforcement of a language code, which is something very much worth recognising, commenting on, and even “quibbling” about.
Maybe if Russia invaded its neighbors less often we wouldn't need special names to distinguish the invasions. It's like the Inuit language which supposedly has lot of different names for different types of snow because they get a lot of it (actually not true) - people who live next to Russia need lots of different names for invasions.
Would you prefer "special military operation" instead? Every media outlet in Russia "insists" on using the exact same term (because they will put you in jail if you call it an invasion). What is your preferred term?Replies: @Matra, @Colin Wright
It’s Democracy when we do it.
Russia wasn't banned from the EBU but it was soft banned from the Eurovision by it being suggested it wasn't "constructive" for them to compete. They haven't been back since.
Meanwhile both Azerbaijan and Israel have been engaged in open conquest and ethnic cleansing of the ancient native peoples of territories under their occupation and nothing happens. (Adding insult to injury when the first war took place Azerbaijan was back at the Eurovision but Armenia couldn't even go because their state broadcaster had a budget problem after the war) Indeed a way to make Turks and Azeris mad would be to make the comparison of both them and Israel having psychopathic national identities based on exterminating the native peoples of lands they deem belong to them by virtue of always being inhabited by the people they deem their destiny to conquer and exterminate. (Greeks, Armenians and Palestinians, respectively)
Who/whom. It's all been one big neocon war. There was never any doubt the minute you provoke and extend the war in Ukraine that things would kick off in the Middle East. How everything Israeli isn't radioactive right now is something nobody will believe in the future. They never know how to behave, just overreach causing a backlash with the only lesson they learn being they weren't crazy enough the last time.
https://i.ibb.co/DMYQj7m/Lose-Their-Minds.gif
It's all the same war. On Russia, on Palestine, on you.Replies: @HA
“It’s all been one big neocon war.”
Yeah, yeah — and let’s remember, just like Putin reminded us, that Poland cruelly forced Hitler to invade them. He was FORCED, I tell ya!
It’s always those neo-cons. Drat their dirty hides, but those people sure do get around. I’ll give ’em that.
We get it.
https://blog.thegreenorganization.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/annoyed-man-830x553.jpgReplies: @The Anti-Gnostic
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
“The Russians assembled an army of over 200,000 men”
When Barbarossa was launched roughly 3 million Axis troops crossed the Soviet frontier. Now that’s what I call a full-scale invasion!
Wiki (no friend of Russia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_of_Ukraine#Structure
“In July 2022, (Ukraine) Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov stated that the Armed Forces had an active strength of 700,000; Reznikov also mentioned that with the Border Guard, National Guard, and police added, the total comes to around one million.”
200,000 seems a tad small to tackle a million, even if the 200,000 are supermen playing 5D chess.
(I think it likely that Russian planners were hoping for a quick surrender rather than a slow suicide. But it was not to be…)
Yes, both as novels and as films, Howard’s End and Being There are morally preening, anti-Christian, and shallow, distorted representations of the societal norms of their respective eras. In addition, Howard’s End, like everything else written by the homosexual Forster, presents a jaundiced view of the heterosexual impulse. It isn’t surprising that that view is also very sympathetically realized in the film.
Taken all in all, it wasn’t much of a stretch for the similarly oriented movie-cartel in-crowd to realize each author’s vision to the full on the big screen. All it took was cash, of which—thanks to their Establishment connections and to the millions upon millions of deluded moviegoing spendthrifts—they had (and still have), in effect, bottomless reserves.
Heart of a Dog is also a great book that remains relevant.
Stalin really liked Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins" which is based on his novel "The White Guard" which is about Ukraine. well worth reading.
The issue I would have with a movie about Master and Margarita, it really should be a mini-series.Replies: @MGB, @HA
it should be animated. a russian miyazaki?
Beginning to wonder if it's always possible for a film to ever really live up to a successful literature masterpiece, because, for the main reason being, a novel is verbal, and thus has to rely upon words to touch and stir the emotions as well as to paint the images in the brain thru descriptions, introspection, dialogue, etc. and so novels, which are books, are all done thru words.
Whereas first and foremost, film is visual and non-verbal. After all, for the first few decades of cinema, film was silent. After the Nickelodeon phase, cinema gradually rose to an art form; it became known as "motion pictures" (and not static words).
A picture is worth a thousand words, is the saying. So basically its best at times to ignore the words and watch the picture. The image paints on the cinematic canvas with images, first and foremost. What is felt, experienced, emoted, etc. is chiefly thru the image and not the words. Rather than reading pages upon pages of descriptions regarding a subject, say, war (e.g. Tolstoy's War and Peace), film, on the other hand, can just show it on the screen. And the point is made in seconds are several minutes.
It probably can be done (and has been done of course over the years) but ultimately, novels and film are both two different kinds of art form and communication, with one being chiefly verbal (if not entirely verbal), and the other primarily visual, with heavy borrowing from words to create the cinematic stories.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Buzz Mohawk
One great example-yet-exception to what you so clearly described is the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s literary counterpart with the same title.
Film director Stanley Kubrick chose science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate with in the early-mid 1960s. Kubric, high off his great success with Dr. Strangelove, wanted to make a great science fiction film.
Clarke agreed and the two collaborated on the story. The result was a historic film and a book.
To quote from Wikipedia:
”
The truth is: Kubrick’s film is much more layered, mysterious and has yielded decades of deep analysis, while Clarke’s book pretty much is taken as literal, which it is.
There is no better example of the difference between film and literature.
Now…let’s see how long it takes this comment to be approved and to appear publicly so you can read it.
How is Russia free? If you’re a homosexual you are persecuted.
Are you upset that you can’t be racist without consequences?
That says more about you than anything.Replies: @Stripes Duncan
When did we begin to measure freedom by openness to degenerate sex?
the press endlessly promoted Don, what with any child understanding the ‘any publicity is good publicity’ maxim, especially when most of his institutional critics, including the press, are deservedly hated. Don, wittingly or not, is part of the divide-and-conquer theatre.
But when I was a kid, I wouldn't have thought I'd end up in an America with show trials, continual black is white/up is down propaganda, promotion of crime and riots, engineered elections, arbitrary detention, endless lawfare, routine firing for voicing contra-narrative opinions, continual lawfare, ludicrous civil judgements and/or criminal charges for simply speaking in one's defense, the lawfare against the lawyers who defend you ... the sort of totalitarianism found in the books and plays we read for school.
And that's just for breakfast. Lunch is denying sexual dimorphism, family, fertility. And dinner is normalizing open genocidal population replacement.
It's time for Steve--and "conservative" politicians and people--to get off the whole "when will these people wake up and 'see' that they're the ones doing bad things". They are not "waking up" to the irony. They have their ideology. They believe it. They are enforcing it ... on us--and destroying our nation, our civilization, the West.
As in 1776--only more so--it is time for separation.Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Muggles
Your comment has the attributes of most of the rightwing/conservative/anti Woke commentary.
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of “decrying about what is being done.” Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your “solution” excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. “Separation.”
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where “separation” into to some kind of insular or political “utopia” apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or “separation.”
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a “solution”. But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, “magic wand solution.”
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of “separation”. Not nearly as easy as griping.
We can always sketch out in as much detail as desired how devolution will proceed but historically it just happens and the details get worked out then. We've seen this in our lifetimes: the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. There's also Singapore, Eritrea, South Sudan, Somaliland. History has not ended.This is the cherished belief of every ideological conservative who's convinced if people will just read that George Will column you forwarded to them then the scales will fall from their eyes. It doesn't happen; politics are umbilical. Black people believe white people owe them reparations and your earnest lecturing about their immense socio-economic good fortune to be here instead of Africa, and that the Constitution proscribes bills of attainder and that corruption of blood is retrograde and unethical, will not change their minds.
"Good people of East St. Louis, reparations would violate Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 30 of the Missouri Constition, and the classical liberal principles which our great Proposition Nation embodies!"
[is set on fire]Replies: @Mark G.
To enjoy in our Western World health and centrally heated comfort, while reading the gripes and Noticings™ of our semi-famous host -- who also buys the very same mass-produced, excellent groceries and enjoys years of life gifted to him by American medicine (thank God.)
None of us, as far as I know, is even remotely fighting a battle aside from our personal ones. Nor should we! We read and write! And we shop. Our wives shop. We spend dollars! We consume!
LOL.
Really, LOL. Any commenter here who pretends to argue in favor of getting off our butts and actually "revolving" history in any way is self-deluded at best.
The revolution has been postponed.
But I discovered a new Prosecco today. You see, one of my friends in this neighborhood owns four liquor stores. The finest ones in this county. (No, he is not the Indian Patel I've mentioned. This guy is English, an experienced importer, and his stores are top-tier.)
Borgo Molino Motivo Asolo is very bubbly, light and smooth. Good to drink while you lecture and wait on your ass for younger men to make revolution.
https://winefocus.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Motivo-ASOLO-DOCG-Prosecco-Superiore-Millesimato-Brut-768x2293.png
The right could attract many of this latter group if they tried, but they don't. Not only do they ride hobby horses that don't resonate with most people (make abortion illegal, for example), they hate and drive away those who are, or could be convinced to be, allies: white women (especially well-educated professionals and those serving in the armed forces), Jews, American Indians, Californians, West Virginians, Hollywood, the military (for some reason most especially naval aviators), pro-Ukrainians, billionaires, Walmart shoppers, Starbucks baristas, doctors, non-pro-lifers (those who have no particular opinion on abortion but don't want it banned), and of course conservative non-whites, in particular conservative blacks. You name the group and the right sneers at, puts down and hates it.
No wonder the right never win. They don't really want to. They prefer to make the welkin ring with their pullulating yodels of resentment rather than gain power and have to actually make happen what they say they want to happen.
Go ahead, Poindexters of Unz, mark this comment "troll." It will only prove my point. You could actually achieve many of your goals if you would only look in the mirror, think about what you say and how it repels, drives away, many potential allies. And also makes you look like unpleasant, whining losers. Which for the last couple of generations you have been. And no one likes a loser.Replies: @Mark G., @Stripes Duncan
Minoritarianism is incompatible with any form of continuing civilization. But the immigration zealots make this point in bright neon lights with fireworks. It's explicitly a policy of national destruction. This is not some routine contentious policy debate like Vietnam, Iraq or socialized medicine. It is existential. "Separation" is saying "we can't live with this". And ergo focuses the debate precisely on that "existential" point.2) exposes the parasite/host relationship
The Parasite Party's "coalition of the fringes" is essentially a parasitic coalition. They need us we don't need them. This is true whether you're talking about the high-end--Jews, good-whites in finance, lawyering, academia, or the middle tier public sector/public funded bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and assorted trouble-makers or the welfare class and criminal class blacks.(Wisconsin's sort of my "go to" for explaining this. The Democrat pieces like the good-whites in Madison or the blacks in north Milwaukee require the boring productive white-bread farmers and factory workers to fund their project. Cut off from the rest of Wisconsin ... those places--even high-income ones like Madison--do not work.)The minoritarian narrative was built around "slavery" ... "racism!". But the actual parasite/host relationship is actually the other way. Normal Americans simply do not need the "coalition of the fringes" people--at all. But the coalition of the fringes people are still very much need a big prosperous batch of normie productive Americans to provide them the their loot. We are their "serfs".Talking "separation" starts unmasking the fundamental parasitism driving minoritarianism and in doing so debunks its narrative.~Furthermore, "separation politics" lets us start actually working on immediate "separationist" solutions. "Mini-separation" if you will.1) School choice.
Making it easier for normie parents the chance to educate their children as they see fit. And critically, breaking the public school behemoth which indoctrinates normie children and is a critical leg of the Parasite Party patronage/activism machine.2) Separate communities.
States could allow/encourage separate explicitly "closed communities" that are allowed to enforce a border--refuse admittance. Normies could build non-infiltrateable communities.There's at least a handful of "separationist" style policies like this that states--and communities where states energize it--can start doing to help normies be able to live like normies ... right now! And the debate and contention over them ... is good. It highlights the essential issues noted above.~~~Your "current legal" is doing all your heavy lifting here to make this true. Otherwise this is just "No, it can't work!" skirt cluthing.
An actual separation program someplace like Sweden wouldn't be that difficult at all. Difficulty varies in various European nations. America is more difficult but hardly impossible. I've outlined how it could work a few times before. Technically, it is not that difficult. (I'll try and circle back to this and explain it yet again.) But the important point, is that you aren't waving a "magic wand" and trying to sell some separationist solution in one go. The important point is that you start talking separation and build a separationist politics. And that that process--talking about it--works in favor of exposing and debunking the minoritarian ideology, works in favor of politics getting better for normie Americans.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Muggles, @Hypnotoad666
Since almost all American films are now pro-black women, pro-faggots, anti-white and anti-male, “white males are all cucks, chicks are all girl bosses” pieces of cinematic dog shit, foreign films are the only place to find anything remotely watchable.
If you think about the past 5-10 years of American cinema- How many of them will even be remembered in 10 or 20 years? They are the entertainment equivalent of fast food.
That said, based on a recommendation for “extreme movies”, I just watched “A Serbian Film”, which was fucking disgusting garbage; So not all foreign films are worth the viewing either.
But I prefer actually Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog” to “Master Margarita” (as a Russian speaker would call the book). The former is a brilliant satire on the theme of the New Soviet Man, and is funny as hell as well as being bitterly sad. Would make a great animated film.Replies: @Matthew Kelly, @russianguy, @MGB, @Jack D
Is this a joke? The title of the book in Russian is “Мастер и Маргарита” (Master and Margarita) . The Russian language lacks articles but it does use conjunctions (i = and).
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies are pretty hecking awesome, almost perfectly matching my teenage imagination of them.
First of all, it was not uniform – the AP wrote “full on invasion”. 2nd, as others noted, there is a reason for calling this invasion the “full scale/0n invasion” in order to distinguish it from the more limited 2014 invasion.
Maybe if Russia invaded its neighbors less often we wouldn’t need special names to distinguish the invasions. It’s like the Inuit language which supposedly has lot of different names for different types of snow because they get a lot of it (actually not true) – people who live next to Russia need lots of different names for invasions.
Would you prefer “special military operation” instead? Every media outlet in Russia “insists” on using the exact same term (because they will put you in jail if you call it an invasion). What is your preferred term?
Putin was an adolescent in 1968 when the USSR put a stop to the 'Prague Spring.' The Bear sends in tanks, everyone is scared shitless, the Bear installs a government more to its liking.
I think that was what was supposed to happen in 2022. It didn't, of course; the Russian incursion was a fiasco. But within a couple of months, it was perfectly clear what the outcome was going to be; The Ukraine was going to have to accept that Russia got some bits that weren't exactly (or even approximately) Ukrainian to begin with; Russia was going to have to settle for an otherwise independent Ukraine that merely couldn't join NATO.
And here we still are; minus another hundred billion or so dollars and I assume some hundreds of thousands of lives.
And oh yeah; the Ukraine has been further depopulated. Well, I suppose you think we should continue.
Why? What point is going to be made that hasn't already been made?
So the Men of Unz trying to make something out of this - "Ooh, Russia is better than America. Grocery prices are lower AND there is less censorship" are Putin's useful idiots, as usual.
Fortunately, this is 2024 and there are all sorts of streaming platforms, etc. so you don't have to move to the Upper West Side to see a movie like this if you are one of the 3 people in America who actually wants to see it.Replies: @Muggles, @Unintended Consequence
Yes, all good points made.
iSteve and the NYT excerpt here don’t bother to tell us anything about the actual plot other than it is anti censorship written during the Stalin period.
But why is this important now, to us? Don’t we already hate censorship? In what way does this plot as filmed resonate to modern American audiences today?
It may be more important that current Russian audiences relate to it, as Putin is ruthlessly censoring any popular outlets of criticism in Russia today of his main project: invading a neighboring nation.
That point gets ignored by Putin apologists and fanboys.
Killing or banning actual political opponents and shutting down opposition political parties and news outlets is what Putin is doing right now. Ironically, supposed libertarian outlets like LewRockwell.com publish Russian propaganda and apologia for the invasion. They seem to live in the past circa 1980 when the US was the main global hegemon power. Putin advocates a return to Czarist Russia. And uses tanks to get it. America’s global military reach is increasingly unpopular here.
Since this new film is in Russian, it would be expensive to translate/dub for American audiences. Since the plot is based on a 90 year old foreign nation context which few Americans now care about, why is this film so important today? What are the plot points?
Modern American (and Euorpean) Woke academia and intelligensia ruthlessly push censorship and cancelation of opposing viewpoints and their advocates. What they lack is the all powerful secret police and gulags. The FBI and Jan. 6 demonstrator federal prisons are only soft imitations of those. Firing opinion columnists and dissident journalists is just losing a good job, not the end of normal life.
A modern American version of this film might be wonderful. As it is, as Jack D notes, probably just an art house project which won’t get funded. It might make NYT censors look bad…
The studio footage is interesting. It started out (like most of the tracks on Beggars Banquet) as a folk song and morphed from there. The driving pulse of the song is actually the piano part.
…that is extracted from the film “one plus one” which is the most juvenile propaganda I’ve ever seen.
no wonder since Master and Margherita was intended by Bulgakov as a russian/bolshewik version of Goethes Faust.German wikipedia has the details nicley sorted out:Bulgakov already refers to Goethe's Faust in the motto. It is said:“Well then, who are you? – A part of that power that always wants evil and always creates good.”This refers to Voland, and this is the name Mephistopheles gives himself in the Walpurgis Night scene:“Mephistopheles: What! already carried away there? I'll have to use house rules. Place! Junker Voland is coming. Place! sweet mob, space!”Similarly, the Master is a reference to Faust and Margarita is an embodiment of Gretchen, whose name is a pet form of Margarethe. The plot of the novel takes up Goethe's work in various ways and parodies it or uses it for parody. For example, the Master's pact with Satan can be read as a Faustian pact or the rescue of the Master and Margarita as a reference to the ending of Faust I. Numerous references can also be identified on a symbolic level: For example, the poodle motif appears several times (Voland's walking stick, Margarita necklace, motif on the pillow). The ball is a variation on the Walpurgis Night theme.
You’re not connecting the dots. It was not Stalin. It was Comintern and people who ran it and the promise that it carried. From 1947 that promise was carried by differ t means thus Communism in the US changed its focus.
Can you connect the dots now?
Putin reminded us that Poland was not a helpless victim in 1930s but just as predatory as Germany, just not as big or strong. And of course, trusted UK which can be fatal. Brush up on your comprehension skills, will you?
Maybe if Russia invaded its neighbors less often we wouldn't need special names to distinguish the invasions. It's like the Inuit language which supposedly has lot of different names for different types of snow because they get a lot of it (actually not true) - people who live next to Russia need lots of different names for invasions.
Would you prefer "special military operation" instead? Every media outlet in Russia "insists" on using the exact same term (because they will put you in jail if you call it an invasion). What is your preferred term?Replies: @Matra, @Colin Wright
Just saying “invasion” is fine. Adding “full scale” almost every time sounds as propagandistic as pro-Putin commentators who insist on saying “special military operation”. Preferring news reporting to be unbiased or at least free from political jargon and phrases designed to trigger emotions is probably an old school Anglo-Saxon thing that other groups, including perhaps yours, just don’t understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz8LjPqWsPcReplies: @HA, @Sorel McRae
Very poor English dubbing, I must say. So annoyingly bad, I wished they had just used subtitles. I look forward to the new version.
This version has Pete Townshend, John and Yoko groovin’ in cult gear in the audience.
Peak Sixties Spookiness before Manson showed up to ruin the party.
Jagger would go on to score the music to Kenneth Anger’s film Invocation of My Demon Brother which starred Anton LaVey of The Church of Satan and Manson Family murderer Bobby Beausoleil.
After my last post I went to YouTube typed in Ukraine/Russia. This video from the Hudson Institute came up.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches the two-year mark…
Neocons must watch things like this and dream of all the smart bombs it would take to destroy it all:
Exploring Tehran's Metro: What Does The Iranian Society Look Like In The Subway?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LB7fmEFB9Rc
Where Did TUCKER CARLSON Eat & Shop in RUSSIA ?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SKBMYst_eAE
Sympathy For The Devil?
Killing Jesus Christ? Nicholas II and his family? JFK?
Hmmm? What happens if you play this song backwards?
Cue: Almost Hear You Sigh by The Rolling Stooooones
Yep, that explains it. People are just pinning for stories with teutonic terrorists, repressive Christian fathers, righteous, selfless Jews, homosexual sex scenes, outsmarting women, butt-kicking babes, vile pickup driving villians, black rocket scientists … and always virtuous oppressed minorities and evil oppressive whites and of course the holocaust.
How about people like a story, good guys and bad guys, action, romance, thrills and chills, maybe some violence and some steamy sex … and Hollyweird serves that up packed with their minoritarian propaganda?
~
I think the role of Hollyweird in the decline of the West is way under-appreciated. Peddling the minoritarian narrative, but peddling it with pictures that seem to our brains like reality and zip past our “could be bullshit” filter have for verbal communication with strangers.
In the before time, people in any culture got their information, ideas and pictures of the world from their family and community–from people who perhaps even loved and wanted what was best for them, but certainly “on their side” in terms of the survival of the nation’s people and culture.
Turns out having people get their stories–much less through modern visual media–from a hostile minority outgroup who are not on their side is a really, really, really bad idea.
But, fewer white recruits equals more diversity, so that is double-plus good, is it not?
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches the two-year mark...Replies: @Cagey Beast
The good old Hudson Institute. There’s no money or prestige in lobbying to improve American infrastructure so they make a living coming up with reasons to destroy other people’s infrastructure.
Neocons must watch things like this and dream of all the smart bombs it would take to destroy it all:
Exploring Tehran’s Metro: What Does The Iranian Society Look Like In The Subway?
Where Did TUCKER CARLSON Eat & Shop in RUSSIA ?
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
The “really enjoy” part is impossible for me to rebut, NJ, but I know of stories whose film adaptations were superior to the written word: e.g., Shane, High Noon, Big Fish and High and Low.
The novel Shane was the stuff of natural fascism: Shane was a strapping 6-feet tall, with dark hair, and was superhuman. Conversely, in the year of casting against type (1953; see Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity), the Super Chief, George Stevens, cast blonde, slender, 5’5” Alan Ladd as Shane, who in this incarnation was vulnerable. In the end, Shane, though victorious, has been wounded by a back-shooter, and his fate is ambiguous. He refuses to go back to the Starretts’ house for Marian to treat him, because it’s time to go, and Shane is one end of an unconsummated love triangle with Marian and Joe Starrett. And so, we get one of the most famous (and oft parodied) endings of all time, as little Joey Starrett implores him to come back.
The ending is so towering because Laddie plumbed previously untapped levels of talent, Vic Young’s music gave him a proper send-off, and little Brandon de Wilde was sensational as Little Joey.
And, of course, the Super Chief was at the peak of his powers.
In Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), Carl Foreman was working off John W. Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star,” which was no great shakes. However, Foreman had seen a brilliant, 20th Century Fox Henry King Western, The Gunfighter (1950), which had made the ticking clock a central motif. Time was running out on the eponymous protagonist, Jimmie Ringo (in a laughable attempt at uglying up the prettiest face in Hollywood, Greg Peck).
But in addition to a great comeback performance by Coop, and a brilliant script by Foreman, High Noon has an amazing theme song and score by Tiomkin, with lyrics by Ned Washington (which google’s ai butchered, turning “or his’n” into “or his”), which set up the whole story in the first five minutes, thereby transcending pictures’ fundamental words/images conflict….
High and Low was a great movie. One of Kurosawa's only films with a contemporary setting. I was fortunate to catch it on the big screen in one of those revival houses that were common in the 80s (and sadly no longer seem to exist).
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
“No Country For Old Men” was one of the better (and maybe the last) book to movie adaptations which captured the feel and storytelling of the book. The fact they kept the bleak message and didn’t try to wrap it all up in a happy ending like Hollywood usually does with many movies based on books was good.
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
All multi-national empires eventually devolve into their constituent nations. Blue State lawfare, tax policy, COVID mandates–more broadly, society and culture–are motivating geographic sorting in the US which will inevitably mean ethnogenesis and new countries where the old one was.
We can always sketch out in as much detail as desired how devolution will proceed but historically it just happens and the details get worked out then. We’ve seen this in our lifetimes: the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. There’s also Singapore, Eritrea, South Sudan, Somaliland. History has not ended.
This is the cherished belief of every ideological conservative who’s convinced if people will just read that George Will column you forwarded to them then the scales will fall from their eyes. It doesn’t happen; politics are umbilical. Black people believe white people owe them reparations and your earnest lecturing about their immense socio-economic good fortune to be here instead of Africa, and that the Constitution proscribes bills of attainder and that corruption of blood is retrograde and unethical, will not change their minds.
“Good people of East St. Louis, reparations would violate Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 30 of the Missouri Constition, and the classical liberal principles which our great Proposition Nation embodies!”
[is set on fire]
Anyone who has read a lot of history knows this. Biden might want to stop bragging about how the government has F-16s and can't be toppled and read some history, followed by "Ozymandias" by Shelley.
The 20th century saw the rise of German national socialism, Russian international socialism and American democratic socialism. The first two are gone and the third is heading out the door. Our Mideast interventions led to a pro-Iranian Iraq and Taliban control of the government of Afghanistan. Our Ukrainian proxy war with Russia is failing.
The military is having trouble recruiting conservative Whites. The federal government has a 34 trillion dollar debt. Conservatives are leaving places like New York and California for Florida, Texas etc. Texas is now directly challenging Biden on the immigration issue. The dissolution of this country has already begun.
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
Don’t you know? We here are all supposed to gripe and pontificate — and then buy groceries and bring them back to our comfortable 20th-21st Century American/Western World homes and enjoy.
To enjoy in our Western World health and centrally heated comfort, while reading the gripes and Noticings™ of our semi-famous host — who also buys the very same mass-produced, excellent groceries and enjoys years of life gifted to him by American medicine (thank God.)
None of us, as far as I know, is even remotely fighting a battle aside from our personal ones. Nor should we! We read and write! And we shop. Our wives shop. We spend dollars! We consume!
LOL.
Really, LOL. Any commenter here who pretends to argue in favor of getting off our butts and actually “revolving” history in any way is self-deluded at best.
The revolution has been postponed.
But I discovered a new Prosecco today. You see, one of my friends in this neighborhood owns four liquor stores. The finest ones in this county. (No, he is not the Indian Patel I’ve mentioned. This guy is English, an experienced importer, and his stores are top-tier.)
Borgo Molino Motivo Asolo is very bubbly, light and smooth. Good to drink while you lecture and wait on your ass for younger men to make revolution.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
II. Big Fish (2003), directed by the notoriously inarticulate Tim Burton, was based on the eponymous short story by Daniel Wallace, and scripted by John August. (Yeah, it was sold as a novel, but with puffed-up typeface and tiny pages.)
The story was so revoltingly bizarre—with a character missing fingers, because a vicious dog periodically bites them off—that my chief of research, who was reading aloud to me, only got to around page 50, before we both quit on it.
The picture is heartbreakingly beautiful, if uneven. The unevenness is due to the Finney Factor.
Albert Finney plays the protagonist, traveling salesman Edward Bloom, as a dying, old man, and he’s a grand, old ham. However, Ewan McGregor, who plays him as a young man, is very good, but not good enough. He’s just not large enough.
Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the love of Edward Bloom’s life, Sandra, as a coed, when he courts her, and as his middle-aged wife, Sandra.
In spite of my as yet unrequited love for Jessica Lange, the role that breaks your heart is that of Jenny, played by Hailey Anne Nelson, as an eight-year-old, and by Tim Burton’s lady love, Helena Bonham Carter, as a young and then middle-aged woman. (Carter also plays a witch.) Jenny falls in love with Edward when she’s eight, and he promises to wait for and return for her when she’s grown, but he’s late.
I see I’m not doing this masterpiece any sort of justice.
The story of Edward Bloom is a story of fantastical whimsy, a picaresque of a man who wanders from one adventure to another, of a magical town hidden from the world of barefoot folk, whose shoes have all been tossed onto telephone lines by a beautiful little girl, of underwater detours, of a circus impresario who is now man, now beast.
I had hoped that Big Fish would get Finney his Oscar, but it did poorly at the box office, and got only one nomination, for frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s moving score.
I haven’t seen it in a while, and must see it again.
(One inaccuracy is that Billy Crudup plays the protagonist’s literal-minded, ap reporter son. If only ap operatives were literal-minded! I’m looking at you, Tom Hays!)
Big Fish is a personal though hardly auto-biographical work for Burton, in which he shows how a story-teller starts out with reality, and embellishes on it.
I thought well, I ought to go back and read that great literary work by Cooper to see what it was really all about.
Three chapters in I gave up. I watched the movie a second time and found it quite enjoyable.
Speaking of second impressions, I remember reading Wuthering Heights as a young adult and loving it. Then I remember putting it on Audible for a long car trip later in life and by the end I was laughing at the overwrought dialogue and contrived plotting. Had to pull over and fan myself with a lavender-scented handkerchief.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
III. One last example. Salvatore Lombino’s procedural, King’s Ransom (1959).
It’s a very good novel about a kidnapping, engineered by a self-styled criminal mastermind, in which everything goes wrong, which was published during the heyday of the heist movie.
Somebody passed along the novel by Lombino, better known as both Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, to Kurosawa, who identified with the protagonist, a man rich and powerful, but who started out at the bottom of the corporate ladder in the shoe business, and had to learn every job in the factory on the way up, just as Kurosawa, who had studied art, and then apprenticed as an assistant director, had to learn every job (save composer) involved in making a movie.
Kurosawa and his collaborators made a hybrid of a story of corporate chicanery and kidnapping with a Dr. Mabuse story. Kurosawa’s version (and vision), High and Low (1963), was a story of class hatred, and the role of intelligence and team work in society, and how they could outwit a diabolical criminal. Kurosawa also does amazing things with motion and spacing in consecutive scenes set in a jazz club and outside in a seemingly enclosed space of heroin addicts. It’s around #50 on my list of the 100 Greatest Pictures.
Spite Lee has announced that he plans to destroy High and Low this year in an unmake.
Candide is 275-odd years old, and I still "get it". Not sure if my kids would, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CandideReplies: @Bardon Kaldian
Voltaire’s & Diderot’s short philosophical “novels” are readable because they are quicksilver fictions on ideas & situations without much descriptive detail & elaborate fantasy. On the other hand, Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub” is almost completely uninteresting.
Bulgakov’s novel is chockful of tiresome fantasies, descriptive passages & cultural-historical references that, even when one recognizes them, leave one indifferent. It has no memorable 3-dimensional characters (they’re all grotesques); no dramatic situations one could take as imaginary-real (unlike Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”- which is, in my opinion, also overrated, but not as much as M & M); no incisive critique of what it means to live in a truly totalitarian regime.
In sum, all fictions heavily relying on allegory & fantasy ultimately lose at the end. They fizzle.
The same can be said of supposedly canonical “Gravity’s Rainbow” which is, judging from a distance, not more than a display of virtuosity without substance.
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
And further, the left says no enemies to the left. The right says no friends to the right. The right always talks about the left’s circular firing squads, but they never seem to actually do any damage to their agenda and keep their “coalition of the fringes” together despite occasional upheavals, in part because that fringe element is just that. The core of the left is so-called “normies”: the educated urban, suburban middle and professional classes.
The right could attract many of this latter group if they tried, but they don’t. Not only do they ride hobby horses that don’t resonate with most people (make abortion illegal, for example), they hate and drive away those who are, or could be convinced to be, allies: white women (especially well-educated professionals and those serving in the armed forces), Jews, American Indians, Californians, West Virginians, Hollywood, the military (for some reason most especially naval aviators), pro-Ukrainians, billionaires, Walmart shoppers, Starbucks baristas, doctors, non-pro-lifers (those who have no particular opinion on abortion but don’t want it banned), and of course conservative non-whites, in particular conservative blacks. You name the group and the right sneers at, puts down and hates it.
No wonder the right never win. They don’t really want to. They prefer to make the welkin ring with their pullulating yodels of resentment rather than gain power and have to actually make happen what they say they want to happen.
Go ahead, Poindexters of Unz, mark this comment “troll.” It will only prove my point. You could actually achieve many of your goals if you would only look in the mirror, think about what you say and how it repels, drives away, many potential allies. And also makes you look like unpleasant, whining losers. Which for the last couple of generations you have been. And no one likes a loser.
Your argument boils down to us needing to find the strength in diversity. Excuse me whilst I guffaw.
Hitler bad. Jews good.
We get it.
Film director Stanley Kubrick chose science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate with in the early-mid 1960s. Kubric, high off his great success with Dr. Strangelove, wanted to make a great science fiction film.
Clarke agreed and the two collaborated on the story. The result was a historic film and a book.
To quote from Wikipedia:"
The truth is: Kubrick's film is much more layered, mysterious and has yielded decades of deep analysis, while Clarke's book pretty much is taken as literal, which it is.
There is no better example of the difference between film and literature.
Now...let's see how long it takes this comment to be approved and to appear publicly so you can read it.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
Without the book, film is incomprehensible. It is not better or worse, it’s a muddle. To paraphrase E.M. Forster- not a mystery. A muddle.
Lookit, if you really want a good inside critique of Stalinism, then read Nadezhda Mandelstam, "Hope Against Hope." Or la goddess Akhmatova. Or even Gerhardie, FFS. Meantime, for all his capricious occasional broad-minded-ness, Stalin remains the guy who had Vsevolod Meyerhold tortured and killed for no reason.
* * *
OT, but not being a sports-watching guy, I nevertheless got dragged to a hockey-watching party for the big Rangers/Islanders stadium game, which I must admit was epic in its way. Astounded they actually filled the whole stadium, when hockey is a game which usually only fills MSG roughly 30k.
Anyway for me, battle-scarred avant-gardist that I am, was a commercial which used as its soundtrack "I'll Be Your Mirror" from the ferociously avant super-group The Velvet Underground. Couldn't believe me ears: that is HOW f#cking old I am.
Not a sports guy at all, in fact an anti-sports guy, but when I was a kid for weird sociological reasons I got dragged into playing pretty much every sport -- even boxing!#! -- and even though I totally sucked at every single one of 'em, at least I can say I did it. My favorite torture was ice hockey, which I got dragooned into doing at 3 AM at Sky Rink pickup games courtesy of my older brother who was an athletic star, who insisted that the geeky nerd come along and play because it would "build character". Which I still do not possess.
Anyway of all the dopey team sports, aside from baseball which is sublime and more on the level of chess, I think ice hockey is the best: the elegance and precision of ballet, the technological (skating/stick handling) fury of NASA, and the brute zaniness of kick-boxing, all without the dumb grandiosity of bakkaball. Plus, buncha white guys for a friggin' change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5STk2JtkRyo&list=RDMM&index=24Replies: @Thea, @Ganderson
Love Akhmatova.
Daniil Kharms wrote beautifully during her that period and paid with his life.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
That map certainly justifies the term “full-on invasion”. At least give the guy credit for calling it an invasion. In the early days, and even for many months after, I still saw people calling it a “Special Military Operation”, which really marked them out as Putin-dupes.
I’m certainly no military man, but it appears that the Russians were trying for a quick knock-out blow with their assault on Kiev. Presumably to install a puppet regime and negotiate a favorable peace.
After getting beat up a lot worse than they counted on, the Russians seem to have retrenched to more limited war aims – just digesting the Donbass and perhaps enough territory to link up with Crimea on the western side of the Sea of Azov.
Neither government is going to win on terms that they would like, so they should just make peace already. However, neither government cares about the welfare of their own people, so I don’t expect that to happen.
I already explained to you that “full scale invasion” is descriptive to distinguish from the previous one. Maybe if Russia had only invaded Ukraine once in recent history, “invasion” would suffice, but sadly, that’s not the case. It could have been “2022 invasion ” or some other term but “full scale invasion” is the one that stuck.
Trying to attaching Jewishness to everything you don’t like is idiotic, but it’s especially ridiculous to hold up objective journalism (if such a thing actually exists at all) as some kind of Anglo-Saxon monopoly of which the Jews have no understanding. Would, for example , William Randolph Hearst (“You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”) be an example of magnificent Anglo-Saxon emotionless objectivity which the American Jew controlled press today sadly does not emulate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_HearstReplies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
(Spoilers)
I was surprised to read your opinion, since I love this book. It’s no weirder than a Flann O’Brien novel or Naked Lunch. Surreal humour has become very popular, especially since The Simpsons and other cartoons-for-adults.
The central conceit is a lot of fun (demonic angels from hell come to Earth and torment members of the Russian Communist Party). Bulgakov out-Danted Dante in a way because his divine comedy is just a funnier one. Every bit of supernatural revenge against party officials seems really delightful.
I think the title is well-chosen since the Master and Margarita are the most compelling characters in the book (for me).
Doesn’t Margarita almost leave the Master and run away with a man she just met in the park in a flight of fancy? Or something like that. Bulgakov is able to write women as well as Tolstoy, John Le Carré, and self-aware women writers like Jane Austen and George Eliot.
I’m lucky since I liked every part of this book: the gnostic Gospel re-telling of Pontius Pilate, the Master’s mental breakdown, the allusions to Russian fairytales, and all the rest.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn briefly mentions that Bulgakov was so non-plussed with Soviet society that he used to walk around in public wearing a monocle. Respect.
The novel Shane was the stuff of natural fascism: Shane was a strapping 6-feet tall, with dark hair, and was superhuman. Conversely, in the year of casting against type (1953; see Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity), the Super Chief, George Stevens, cast blonde, slender, 5’5” Alan Ladd as Shane, who in this incarnation was vulnerable. In the end, Shane, though victorious, has been wounded by a back-shooter, and his fate is ambiguous. He refuses to go back to the Starretts’ house for Marian to treat him, because it’s time to go, and Shane is one end of an unconsummated love triangle with Marian and Joe Starrett. And so, we get one of the most famous (and oft parodied) endings of all time, as little Joey Starrett implores him to come back.
The ending is so towering because Laddie plumbed previously untapped levels of talent, Vic Young’s music gave him a proper send-off, and little Brandon de Wilde was sensational as Little Joey.
And, of course, the Super Chief was at the peak of his powers.
In Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), Carl Foreman was working off John W. Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star,” which was no great shakes. However, Foreman had seen a brilliant, 20th Century Fox Henry King Western, The Gunfighter (1950), which had made the ticking clock a central motif. Time was running out on the eponymous protagonist, Jimmie Ringo (in a laughable attempt at uglying up the prettiest face in Hollywood, Greg Peck).
But in addition to a great comeback performance by Coop, and a brilliant script by Foreman, High Noon has an amazing theme song and score by Tiomkin, with lyrics by Ned Washington (which google's ai butchered, turning “or his’n” into “or his”), which set up the whole story in the first five minutes, thereby transcending pictures’ fundamental words/images conflict....Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
I usually find the book better than the movie, but there are exceptions as you say. John Houston’s film version of The List of Adrian Messenger was much better than the novel it was based on.
High and Low was a great movie. One of Kurosawa’s only films with a contemporary setting. I was fortunate to catch it on the big screen in one of those revival houses that were common in the 80s (and sadly no longer seem to exist).
The story was so revoltingly bizarre—with a character missing fingers, because a vicious dog periodically bites them off—that my chief of research, who was reading aloud to me, only got to around page 50, before we both quit on it.
The picture is heartbreakingly beautiful, if uneven. The unevenness is due to the Finney Factor.
Albert Finney plays the protagonist, traveling salesman Edward Bloom, as a dying, old man, and he’s a grand, old ham. However, Ewan McGregor, who plays him as a young man, is very good, but not good enough. He’s just not large enough.
Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the love of Edward Bloom’s life, Sandra, as a coed, when he courts her, and as his middle-aged wife, Sandra.
In spite of my as yet unrequited love for Jessica Lange, the role that breaks your heart is that of Jenny, played by Hailey Anne Nelson, as an eight-year-old, and by Tim Burton’s lady love, Helena Bonham Carter, as a young and then middle-aged woman. (Carter also plays a witch.) Jenny falls in love with Edward when she’s eight, and he promises to wait for and return for her when she’s grown, but he’s late.
I see I’m not doing this masterpiece any sort of justice.
The story of Edward Bloom is a story of fantastical whimsy, a picaresque of a man who wanders from one adventure to another, of a magical town hidden from the world of barefoot folk, whose shoes have all been tossed onto telephone lines by a beautiful little girl, of underwater detours, of a circus impresario who is now man, now beast.
I had hoped that Big Fish would get Finney his Oscar, but it did poorly at the box office, and got only one nomination, for frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s moving score.
I haven’t seen it in a while, and must see it again.
(One inaccuracy is that Billy Crudup plays the protagonist’s literal-minded, ap reporter son. If only ap operatives were literal-minded! I’m looking at you, Tom Hays!)
Big Fish is a personal though hardly auto-biographical work for Burton, in which he shows how a story-teller starts out with reality, and embellishes on it.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
In the category of improvements over the source literary work, I remember watching Last of the Mohicans and being kind of turned off by Michael Mann’s approach and the reference to the protagonist by the lofty, “Nathaniel B” instead of the earthy, frontier-era “Natty Bumppo” in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel.
I thought well, I ought to go back and read that great literary work by Cooper to see what it was really all about.
Three chapters in I gave up. I watched the movie a second time and found it quite enjoyable.
Speaking of second impressions, I remember reading Wuthering Heights as a young adult and loving it. Then I remember putting it on Audible for a long car trip later in life and by the end I was laughing at the overwrought dialogue and contrived plotting. Had to pull over and fan myself with a lavender-scented handkerchief.
We get it.
https://blog.thegreenorganization.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/annoyed-man-830x553.jpgReplies: @The Anti-Gnostic
World War 2, man. Is that thing ever gonna be over?
Just, films are motion pictures with music and words combined. And most verbal passages cannot be filmed- especially if they include ideas. Try to adapt Biblical "Ecclesiastes" to the screen. Then, even without ideas, words' arrangement may convey something that one cannot put on the screen.
Take the penultimate chapter ending of Flaubert's "Sentimental Education", when old & crushed lovers part, leaving us with their unconsumed love and unlived lives"And this was all"- as the final anticlimactic climax cannot be filmed.
Simply, a novel/story has much more developed language to convey almost everything, unlike film language.
Except visual action & that's why Jaws, for instance, is better than the book. Because to see all that shark jaw-jawing is not the same as to read about it.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @Jenner Ickham Errican
“Simply, a novel/story has much more developed language to convey almost everything, unlike film language.”
Up to a point, yes. However, film can quite easily show the emotions of the characters’ states of mind. Closeups, mid. shots, etc. Anything that is shown visually. Whereas a novel must rely entirely on words to convey the story, and film isn’t limited by words alone. Ideas can be conveyed thru emotions of the characters. In this sense, film can definitely convey the idea. Certainly dialogue will always have a part to play in the idea’s development during the story, but the perceptive filmmaker will always be able to find a way to convey the idea thru the visual image, which of course is film.
Even music is not entirely necessary. Definitely is helpful, of course. Example: Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (’62) used no music on the soundtrack and relied almost entirely on the sound effects of birds to create the psychological tension, drama, as well as the character’s emotional states.
Character’s emotional states, what they’re feeling and going through, can definitely be shown on film, all things considered.
The Flaubert example could definitely be filmed. Not easily, but it could be done thru various visual displays, thru emotions etc. After all, what the camera does not show is sometimes just as important to the narrative as for what it does show. Perceptive filmmakers can show various things that would take novels tons and tons of pages, and chapters to convey.
During the Silent Era’s Golden Age, D.W. Griffith was the first (or among the first) filmmaker to successfully use the closeup to express the actor’s psychological states of mind. Emoting, or emotions, when done correctly, can match anything a novel can show in print.
At the same time, film during the same era recognized the need for words in the intertitle cards (sometimes mistakenly labeled subtitles). It was Cecil B. DeMille who was among the first to utilize dialogue for the intertitles to help the audience identify with the characters’ emotional/psychological states.
For film, dialogue is definitely important. Unlike novels, it isn’t the entire show for telling a great story. In this sense, film has several more weapons in its arsenal than novels and isn’t limited in its thinking for how to tell a story. Camera angles, music, sound affects, what is and isn’t shown, all help convey the story just if not more effectively than mere words on the paper.
Obviously this is a generalization. But it is also remarkable that before sound came into film, audiences of film from all over the world didn’t need translation to watch a picture; the image was everything and was more than adequate to tell the story no matter the language.
You need to check “Early Life”, as should we all. This is W.R. Hearst’s dad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hearst
Heart of a Dog is also a great book that remains relevant.
Stalin really liked Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins" which is based on his novel "The White Guard" which is about Ukraine. well worth reading.
The issue I would have with a movie about Master and Margarita, it really should be a mini-series.Replies: @MGB, @HA
“Really? I loved the book and am a big fan of Behemoth!”
I thought it was excellent, too. In fact, I was reading that when I visited Ukraine — it seemed appropriate. I liked it even better than Heart of a Dog. The Brits did a serialization of the semi-autobiographical Young Doctor’s Notebook with Daniel Radcliffe as the eponymous drug addict and also John Hamm, that was depressing, but watchable.
As for M&M, Bulgakov must have read a different gospel than the ones I remember, but you could tell he was trying to be sincere, and that’s saying a lot, given where he was coming from. And I suspect Jagger wasn’t the only one back in the psychedelic 60’s who was influenced by the trippy, surrealism of the novel. Everyone from the Merry Pranksters to Dylan’s diplomat-with-a-Siamese-cat seems to have lifted an idea or two. Or maybe it was some kind of parallel evolution.
All Orthodox & Muslim cultures share:
a) pre-rational public discourse, mythological approach & logical impotence
b) emo blather in public talk, even among academicians
c) disregard for empirical facts
d) collective psychological immaturity & infantile world-view
With or without censorship, both academics & garbage collectors.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @AndrewR
Is there a difference these days?
(Well, the latter recycle, too. Academia once did as well, but now it’s all deconstruction.)
Film director Stanley Kubrick chose science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate with in the early-mid 1960s. Kubric, high off his great success with Dr. Strangelove, wanted to make a great science fiction film.
Clarke agreed and the two collaborated on the story. The result was a historic film and a book.
To quote from Wikipedia:"
The truth is: Kubrick's film is much more layered, mysterious and has yielded decades of deep analysis, while Clarke's book pretty much is taken as literal, which it is.
There is no better example of the difference between film and literature.
Now...let's see how long it takes this comment to be approved and to appear publicly so you can read it.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
Yes, 2001 is an interesting example. Shame that the technology is rather dated for 2024 audiences. Also, some reviews at the time made mention that the film was rather boring for some, or, could’ve been edited down a bit (which it was, if memory is correct) from its original length.
Sometimes, just as the reader, the film audience will “read into”, or….”see what they wish to see” in a film. This can either be a great help or a great detriment to the project as a whole.
One lament regarding Star Trek the Original Series, (which of course was shown around the time of 2001) is that it was too wordy, and not as visual as it could have been. Excellent characters at times; and yet, too much explanation, too much exposition. Granted, perhaps at the time the creators had other examples to follow (e.g. The Twilight Zone; Wagon Master; etc) rather than just tell the stories without lengthy exposition. And also the technology for the time, was fairly primitive–especially when compared to today. Although for the time, 2001’s special effects were spectacular and were quite the standard to measured vs for future Sci-Fi films.
Exposition in novels obviously works quite well. In film, (and TV by extension since TV is visual as well), it becomes rather unnecessary for the most part since film can convey the same concepts in less time.
Perhaps the one cardinal rule of film is not to bore the audience. Ironically this can happen whenever a film is too talky, or weighted down with too much static dialogue, especially when the images and visuals can more than tell the story and make the point in less than half the time.
Keep it moving. That’s why its motion pictures and not static words.
We can always sketch out in as much detail as desired how devolution will proceed but historically it just happens and the details get worked out then. We've seen this in our lifetimes: the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. There's also Singapore, Eritrea, South Sudan, Somaliland. History has not ended.This is the cherished belief of every ideological conservative who's convinced if people will just read that George Will column you forwarded to them then the scales will fall from their eyes. It doesn't happen; politics are umbilical. Black people believe white people owe them reparations and your earnest lecturing about their immense socio-economic good fortune to be here instead of Africa, and that the Constitution proscribes bills of attainder and that corruption of blood is retrograde and unethical, will not change their minds.
"Good people of East St. Louis, reparations would violate Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 30 of the Missouri Constition, and the classical liberal principles which our great Proposition Nation embodies!"
[is set on fire]Replies: @Mark G.
“All multi-national empires eventually devolve into their constituent nations”.
Anyone who has read a lot of history knows this. Biden might want to stop bragging about how the government has F-16s and can’t be toppled and read some history, followed by “Ozymandias” by Shelley.
The 20th century saw the rise of German national socialism, Russian international socialism and American democratic socialism. The first two are gone and the third is heading out the door. Our Mideast interventions led to a pro-Iranian Iraq and Taliban control of the government of Afghanistan. Our Ukrainian proxy war with Russia is failing.
The military is having trouble recruiting conservative Whites. The federal government has a 34 trillion dollar debt. Conservatives are leaving places like New York and California for Florida, Texas etc. Texas is now directly challenging Biden on the immigration issue. The dissolution of this country has already begun.
Movies are best in depiction of action, or rendering of atmosphere of a certain age (costumes, manner of speech etc.). But, in most other fields, film language is sorely lacking. For instance, brilliant acting & music are the only tools in description of horror, when Hoskins’ character realizes he’s being driven away by the IRA gang to be executed. His grimaces are the most film language can come up with, while a good novelist could extract pages & pages about the same scene.
Or take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ending.
The Star-child scene is idiotic.
We are to believe that the guy was transformed into some kind of star-god who has will & paraphysical powers. And this is- a star. With a developed fetus inside (at least, that’s how we know that this transformed guy has become a humanoid super-physical star). Can you get more nonsensical than that? Stars are just stars. There is nothing within, or around them, that is remotely human, or “alive” (any form of life imaginable included). Stars have no will, intelligence, identity, power, … nothing.
I get that Kubrick/Clarke wanted that guy to undergo transformation into a god-like supra-physical being transcending ordinary 3+1 universe. I understand their intention & accept it. But: a) this is not supra-physical existence, Star-child being some extremely weird star in physical universe, b) fetal phase is ultimately comical, c) they should have presented some kind of god-like being our guy has become outside of space-time & acting on it from beyond & “above”, d) the fetal stuff makes it all hilarious. He should have become a hyper- humanoid being with traces of humanity, but, basically- a god beyond space-time.So, this legendary scene is, in my view, completely botched.
They failed, but the public & reviewers were just transfixed by unexpectedness, so they uncritically accepted this anti-climax as the climax.
An author more intelligent than Clarke/Kubrick would have ended it better.
The monolith, and meeting it, symbolize the Marxist idea about progressive stages in human social evolution, the dialectical synthesis when society reach a higher civilizational plane.
The main character represents the Leninist idea of the communist vanguard (therefore named "Bowman").
HAL is the symbolic embodiment of the bourgeois super-structure tying down man and preventing the full flourishing of the human potential.
The final scene is a metaphor for the evolution of man until he reach a higher state of consciousness; the New (Communist) Man is born.
And so on.The movie is communist propaganda.
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
In general, you may well be right, but I thought the film version of 1984 — the one with John Hurt and Richard Burton — was very good. The television miniseries about a fiction RAF squadron in the first year of the war, Piece of Cake, was actually better than the novel it was based on. I’d say the same for the film version of Fat City.
I never actually read or have forgotten the novels they are based on, but The Natural, The Sand Pebbles, The Bridge, Gettysburg, and the Cohen brothers’ version of True Grit are all excellent films in their own right.
Now you’ve got me going. What we need is a mini-series based on Colin McDougall’s novelized memoir, Execution, about a Canadian infantry company in World War Two. It occasionally gets too ambitious — but some of the combat scenes are very convincing. Here’s a hopeless (and pointless) assault on the Adolf Hitler Line.
Boomer shakes his fist at the funny TV that makes phone sounds, wonders how people will acquire digital media in the current year.
I buy Russian stuff all the time.
Consider my recent comment here and ask yourself if you want to watch magic spider people.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/freeways/#comment-6420145
I think the distinction was that back in the gentile day, if the News said ‘a’, the Tribune would promptly say ‘b.’ You had a conservative paper — and a liberal paper. Between them, they would present both sides of a lot of issues.
Now, you get that tacit, unspoken and perhaps even unconscious agreement to put over ‘the correct’ view. A particularly disgusting manifestation at the moment is the collaborative effort to sanitize Israel carrying out the worst atrocities committed by a First-World nation since the Nazis put down the Warsaw Uprising.
Maybe if Russia invaded its neighbors less often we wouldn't need special names to distinguish the invasions. It's like the Inuit language which supposedly has lot of different names for different types of snow because they get a lot of it (actually not true) - people who live next to Russia need lots of different names for invasions.
Would you prefer "special military operation" instead? Every media outlet in Russia "insists" on using the exact same term (because they will put you in jail if you call it an invasion). What is your preferred term?Replies: @Matra, @Colin Wright
The number of troops Russia committed was nowheres near enough to carry out the actual conquest of a nation the size of the Ukraine.
Putin was an adolescent in 1968 when the USSR put a stop to the ‘Prague Spring.’ The Bear sends in tanks, everyone is scared shitless, the Bear installs a government more to its liking.
I think that was what was supposed to happen in 2022. It didn’t, of course; the Russian incursion was a fiasco. But within a couple of months, it was perfectly clear what the outcome was going to be; The Ukraine was going to have to accept that Russia got some bits that weren’t exactly (or even approximately) Ukrainian to begin with; Russia was going to have to settle for an otherwise independent Ukraine that merely couldn’t join NATO.
And here we still are; minus another hundred billion or so dollars and I assume some hundreds of thousands of lives.
And oh yeah; the Ukraine has been further depopulated. Well, I suppose you think we should continue.
Why? What point is going to be made that hasn’t already been made?
He’d be aghast at what the entirety of Hollyweird left on the sidewalk last year to curry favor with the Left.
“‘Sound of Freedom’, an independent movie based on the true story of Tim Ballard and his quest to rescue children from sex trafficking, has crossed $100 million at the box office in North America after three weeks of release.1 The film has grossed $248 million worldwide and has surpassed the domestic box office totals of such would-be blockbuster films as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.3 The film was released on July 4, 2023, using equity crowdfunding to raise the funds needed to distribute and market the film.2 It has grossed more than $149 million at the domestic box office since its July 4 opening, ranking ahead of some blockbuster films with big budgets and star-studded casts.”
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
“My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.”
Perhaps there is some regression to the mean involved here. An average film derived from an above average book may seem like a let down. And it is mostly above average books that get filmed.
I also suspect people tend to prefer the version they are exposed to first.
New York's convicted Donald Trump for a "crime" that exists under New York law but in no other state, i.e., he was convicted of fraud for overvaluing (in the state's opinion) the value of real estate on a loan application despite the fact that a.) the lender does not consider the value the borrower states in deciding whether to make the loan and b.) the lender said Trump's assets were sufficient to assure them he would repay it, which he did. He was convicted of fraud although no fraud occurred.Hochul was telling other businessmen not to worry because this obscure law, with which no one has previously been charged under such circumstances, is being used only against Donald Trump. It is a sort of Bill of Attainder. No one who is not Donald Trump need worry. Only, how can they not worry when a state supports this level of corruption? Watch more corporations move to safer climes.Replies: @Prester John, @SafeNow, @Joe Joe
Besides the Trump fine being, as applied, a bill of attainder, the eighth amendment contains a prohibition against excessive fines. So my next question is, just how excessive is it? Well, The War Street Journal’s editorial really dropped the ball. They wrote that the amount of the fine was like firing a hellfire missile at some tiny target, I forget the rest of the simile. I expected them to say “We contacted several prominent white-color-defense attorneys we know, and on average, extrapolating from similar kinds of cases, they opined that the fine should be around $X. I have not read where any media or pundit picked up the slack on this, made a few phone calls, and gave us a figure.
No, of course not, although the hellfire missile comparison is Stresisandy in its self-unawareness. This is fake, wasn’t meant to be serious (New York does not set Florida real estate prices), and is merely a gesture of harassment.
So the Men of Unz trying to make something out of this - "Ooh, Russia is better than America. Grocery prices are lower AND there is less censorship" are Putin's useful idiots, as usual.
Fortunately, this is 2024 and there are all sorts of streaming platforms, etc. so you don't have to move to the Upper West Side to see a movie like this if you are one of the 3 people in America who actually wants to see it.Replies: @Muggles, @Unintended Consequence
“Films like this play in like three art house movie theaters in coastal blue cities for a week, even under favorable circumstances. And right now circumstances are not favorable.”
That’s just not true. Every major metropolitan area will have two or three venues playing foreign films. Russian films aren’t likely to be popular right now but M & M will seem to be controversial so it will be shown everywhere art films are played. Why are you making things up?
If you seriously think people will get confused with the 2014 “invasion” (yes, I used the scare quote, felt more like an Anschlus), than just say 2014 invasion and 2022 invasion. The full-scale feel like putting spin on the ball. And it also is a little bit confused in that, in many ways, the initial invasion was much too light for its goals (and has been critiqued for that from both pro and anti Russian analysts.)
In terms of movies I like better than the books, a few: The Great Escape (read it twice), Predestination (story is amazing, but movie more fun), and Adaptation (OK…I never read the book), Patriot Games (the book is way too right wing formulaic/silly and I say this as a right winger).
The M&M trailer looks pretty Oscar bait-y. Lot of period costumes and music. Hope it is not as annoying as Oppenheimer.
Speaking of Oscar bait, I still want to see this gay monk movie that won the Monkey award:
Daniil Kharms wrote beautifully during her that period and paid with his life.Replies: @MGB
Her best, with credit due to Kunitz for a great translation. I’d guess that a lot of British artsy types turned musician cribbed from that poem, like Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s Talk about the Weather or Polly Jean’s Dry.
White girls excited that their airline pilots are white.
https://t.me/ihateliberals/8254
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
Muggles, all fair, but you just don’t seem to get what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about any “utopia”–utopias do not exist.
My argument is not separation as a utopia, but separation as a “process”–as an argument, politics, and policy..
My claim is that simply talking “separation” is good politics–much better politics than “You’re wrong libtard! Can’t you see blah, blah, blah, blah, blah …” Switching “the conversation” to “separation” does a couple of critical things:
1) highlights the seriousness of the disagreement
Minoritarianism is incompatible with any form of continuing civilization. But the immigration zealots make this point in bright neon lights with fireworks. It’s explicitly a policy of national destruction. This is not some routine contentious policy debate like Vietnam, Iraq or socialized medicine. It is existential.
“Separation” is saying “we can’t live with this”. And ergo focuses the debate precisely on that “existential” point.
2) exposes the parasite/host relationship
The Parasite Party’s “coalition of the fringes” is essentially a parasitic coalition. They need us we don’t need them. This is true whether you’re talking about the high-end–Jews, good-whites in finance, lawyering, academia, or the middle tier public sector/public funded bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and assorted trouble-makers or the welfare class and criminal class blacks.
(Wisconsin’s sort of my “go to” for explaining this. The Democrat pieces like the good-whites in Madison or the blacks in north Milwaukee require the boring productive white-bread farmers and factory workers to fund their project. Cut off from the rest of Wisconsin … those places–even high-income ones like Madison–do not work.)
The minoritarian narrative was built around “slavery” … “racism!”. But the actual parasite/host relationship is actually the other way. Normal Americans simply do not need the “coalition of the fringes” people–at all. But the coalition of the fringes people are still very much need a big prosperous batch of normie productive Americans to provide them the their loot. We are their “serfs”.
Talking “separation” starts unmasking the fundamental parasitism driving minoritarianism and in doing so debunks its narrative.
~
Furthermore, “separation politics” lets us start actually working on immediate “separationist” solutions. “Mini-separation” if you will.
1) School choice.
Making it easier for normie parents the chance to educate their children as they see fit. And critically, breaking the public school behemoth which indoctrinates normie children and is a critical leg of the Parasite Party patronage/activism machine.
2) Separate communities.
States could allow/encourage separate explicitly “closed communities” that are allowed to enforce a border–refuse admittance. Normies could build non-infiltrateable communities.
There’s at least a handful of “separationist” style policies like this that states–and communities where states energize it–can start doing to help normies be able to live like normies … right now! And the debate and contention over them … is good. It highlights the essential issues noted above.
~~~
Your “current legal” is doing all your heavy lifting here to make this true. Otherwise this is just “No, it can’t work!” skirt cluthing.
An actual separation program someplace like Sweden wouldn’t be that difficult at all. Difficulty varies in various European nations. America is more difficult but hardly impossible. I’ve outlined how it could work a few times before. Technically, it is not that difficult. (I’ll try and circle back to this and explain it yet again.)
But the important point, is that you aren’t waving a “magic wand” and trying to sell some separationist solution in one go. The important point is that you start talking separation and build a separationist politics. And that that process–talking about it–works in favor of exposing and debunking the minoritarian ideology, works in favor of politics getting better for normie Americans.
Wisconsin Assembly passes constitutional amendment to limit diversity efforts
Yet, in the end, you and others just wave the magic wand of "separatism" and essentially do the same thing.
I was noting that convincing a large segment of the public was needed, not magic wand phrases.
Yet your separatism details are rather vague and lacking in specifics. Sure, a certain amount of regional and local differences can be done within a larger "state" context. But if that's what you mean then you are just like the libertarians who say they should all move to NH and take over.
Okay. But this physical movement/separation is quite limited and boils down to local/regional affinity politics. Like the difference between California and Texas, for instance.
Okay. But the constant use of "separatism" as the conclusion to comments posted here turns out to be rather weak tea. Fine, because that is the only drink we have.
The "why" of separatism is key.
I prefer simply convincing/persuading the "thought leaders" and intelligent strata of society about the virtue of certain kinds of ideas and the badness of others. This has been done in the past but again, is no magic wand.
We are, I believe, at another turning point now. Wokeness is seeing fierce pushback. Let's keep that up.
I'm not selling magic wands though. Frankly, the term "separatism" seems defeatist and a retreat from evil which you assume can be limited by some physical separation.
So blah-blah-blah is all that is left. The content of that, and the acceptance of that, is what is key.
Or we can just all move to Argentina and hope Melei can remake that place from a Peronist fascist/socialist basket case into some libertarian free market success story.
I am hopeful (a couple of libertarians I knew did buy property years ago in Uruguay) but I'm not condo shopping there yet.
Of course, the shrieking Libtard Corporate Media will do everything they can to delegitimize any talk of free association. But the good news is that their gatekeeper status is eroding fast due to their constant self-beclowning.
Why not? You guys do. Jews hate it when goys act, well, Jewish.
OT
Paul Verhoeven trivia:
1. He directed the shower scene in “Starship Troopers” in the nude to make his cast feel more comfortable.
2. He was the only non-academic voting member of the Jesus Seminar, a project that produced editions of the New Testament gospels (and the Gospel of Thomas) that were color coded to indicate the words that the historical Jesus actually said and the things that he actually did.
Thanks for this, Wade. ‘Pleasure in unrighteousness’, indeed. The signs are everywhere.
Americans, don’t hurt your brains with “The Master and Margarita”. You might get wrong ideas. Maybe watch “The Regime” from HBO, starting next month. It sounds like a digestible knock-off.
How many Americans would care to see it even if made available?
The best way is to turn the story into a series of Tiktok videos.
Master and Margarita feed a cat.
Master and Margarita save a squirrel.
Master and Margarita make ice cream.
Master and Margarita dance to Taylor Swift.
Master and Margarita do pronouns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_HearstReplies: @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
I’m sure you are joking. Wellington was from Ireland, so he’s not Anglo-Saxon?
What about this? It seems that English-language media were the pioneers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Information_(United_Kingdom)
So yes there are people with English names born and raised in Ireland. (They were usually Protestant.)
Ireland was able to shake off English rule after WW 1 devastated Europe. All but a few counties in North Ireland (the so called Scots Irish).Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
Good analysis for the most part, a lot of "decrying about what is being done." Etc.
But complaining is very easy to do.
But your "solution" excerpted above is beyond lame and hopeless.
It is often cited here by some as a kind of magic panacea. "Separation."
Like Gazans separating from the West Bank and Israel? Yes, a totally separate and different situation, but how has ths worked out for them?
There is no current legal way, here or almost anywhere else, where "separation" into to some kind of insular or political "utopia" apart from a larger politicval entity can happen peacefully.
Yes, you can move to a different area of the nation. Some libertarians advocate all of them moving to New Hampshire. A few have. But not much change or actual movement.
Mormons all moved to Utah in the 19th century, and some trickled out elsewhere. Still a strong Mormon culture, but hardly a Mormon utopia or "separation."
Convincing others that their ideas, premises and assumptions are wrong, and yours are better, now that is a "solution". But very difficult to implement, No magic wand here.
Your template commentary (one of millions) is: Complain, complain, notice, decry, observe, complain and then voila, "magic wand solution."
I know it is fun to think this style of argument is effective. Emotionally satisfying even. But like a stiff drink after a bad experience, once the effect quickly wears off, you are left with the sad knowledge that nothing has changed for the better. You are merely kidding yourself.
Let us know when you start filling in those details of "separation". Not nearly as easy as griping.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Buzz Mohawk, @anonymous, @AnotherDad, @epebble
You are right there is no ‘Complete Separation’ as AD desires and may not be possible. But the Blue and Red states are a very practical and convenient separation within the existing Constitutional framework. We have a great deal of diversity between States in terms of demographics, taxation and laws that affect personal life. For example, Western States have stricter gun control than Southern States. Abortion laws are liberal in the West but restrictive in the South. I think increased federalism will help this diversity. True separation would need some sort of control over who can move to a state for residence, work or voting that is not possible in the present Constitution. But if enough states desire that, it is not an impossibility with a constitutional amendment. Then any state can have its own kind of ‘Brexit’ while other states can form their own ‘Schengen Area’ among themselves.
The right could attract many of this latter group if they tried, but they don't. Not only do they ride hobby horses that don't resonate with most people (make abortion illegal, for example), they hate and drive away those who are, or could be convinced to be, allies: white women (especially well-educated professionals and those serving in the armed forces), Jews, American Indians, Californians, West Virginians, Hollywood, the military (for some reason most especially naval aviators), pro-Ukrainians, billionaires, Walmart shoppers, Starbucks baristas, doctors, non-pro-lifers (those who have no particular opinion on abortion but don't want it banned), and of course conservative non-whites, in particular conservative blacks. You name the group and the right sneers at, puts down and hates it.
No wonder the right never win. They don't really want to. They prefer to make the welkin ring with their pullulating yodels of resentment rather than gain power and have to actually make happen what they say they want to happen.
Go ahead, Poindexters of Unz, mark this comment "troll." It will only prove my point. You could actually achieve many of your goals if you would only look in the mirror, think about what you say and how it repels, drives away, many potential allies. And also makes you look like unpleasant, whining losers. Which for the last couple of generations you have been. And no one likes a loser.Replies: @Mark G., @Stripes Duncan
The groups you list have very different views, often in opposition to each other and also in opposition to current Republicans. You do not explain how all these groups could be brought into the same coalition so your comment is largely useless. Also, is calling people names like Poindexters and unpleasant whining losers going to make them open to your suggestions?
My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @theMann, @International Jew, @Je Suis Omar Mateen, @Nicholas Stix, @Sick n' Tired, @Nicholas Stix, @Nicholas Stix, @Colin Wright, @James B. Shearer, @Harry Baldwin
Some great novels cann0t be made into a great film. I recently watched what is supposed to be the best adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Grey,” the one from 1945. Insurmountable problem: Dorian Grey is supposed to be spectacularly good looking and the actor playing him was not. (The young Jude Law–who appears as Wilde’s love interest in Wilde (1997)–would have been fine, had he been available.) In addition to that, though, the portrait of him is supposed to be absolutely inspired, setting a new standard for figurative art. Instead, in the movie, it is utterly banal–how could it not be? Moreover, what makes the novel entertaining are the long exchanges of witticisms at dinner parties and social gatherings and they could put only so much of that in the film.
After rereading Catch 22, which was unsuccessfully brought to film by Mike Nichols in 1973, I saw that George Clooney had done it as a mini-series in 2019. Watching the first episode, I realized it could never work. For example, one of the funniest scenes in the book is the argument between Yossarian and Col. Scheisskopf’s wife, with whom he is having an affair, about God. The scene is funny in the book because of how long the argument goes on. They couldn’t let it go on at such length in the movie, as it would eat up too much time, but by truncating it it is no longer memorable. Also a problem is that in the novel, the war serves mostly as a backdrop to the interplay of the eccentric characters and the absurd, paradox-laden dialogs between them. In film, you need to see action, so Clooney’s mini-series focuses too much on the war itself, on events.
The film of The Road is as good as McCarthy’s novel. The film Forrest Gump is much better than the novel which it was based. Kubrick’s The Shining was better than Stephen King’s novel, which King could never acknowledge, going so far as to authorize a more literal –and terrible–TV adaptation of his book.
How about people like a story, good guys and bad guys, action, romance, thrills and chills, maybe some violence and some steamy sex ... and Hollyweird serves that up packed with their minoritarian propaganda?
~
I think the role of Hollyweird in the decline of the West is way under-appreciated. Peddling the minoritarian narrative, but peddling it with pictures that seem to our brains like reality and zip past our "could be bullshit" filter have for verbal communication with strangers.
In the before time, people in any culture got their information, ideas and pictures of the world from their family and community--from people who perhaps even loved and wanted what was best for them, but certainly "on their side" in terms of the survival of the nation's people and culture.
Turns out having people get their stories--much less through modern visual media--from a hostile minority outgroup who are not on their side is a really, really, really bad idea.Replies: @Anonymous
Interesting comment. It is obvious that movies reflect the prejudices of their creators rather then merely reflect consumer preference as Jack implies. However, you can surely understand why one might be rationally skeptical of your narrative of Jewish Hollywood drastically changing the values and beliefs of the poor normies: it smells like a just-so story for the sake of your “Minoritarianism” model. It would be nice to have serious, quantitative scholarship on these topics: how overrepresented have these tropes been over time relative to reality? How much more do Jews favor them than gentiles? How much do these beliefs really “trickle down” as you say? How does the representation of right-wing/traditional moral/pro-White/Western themes compare (probably, some of those are overrepresented as well)? What have the trends been over time (very helpful in guessing at causes and effects)?
If the movie was created by an American who’s a Quentin Tarrantino wannabee, you can rest assured that the movie will be trash.
That one’s funny, “Spaniards [Strip] Search Women on American Steamers.” George Orwell found Spaniards uniformly decorous around women. In Homage to Catalonia, he describes an instance in which his room was entered by the Spanish secret police in the middle of the night and methodically searched for two hours.
After rereading Catch 22, which was unsuccessfully brought to film by Mike Nichols in 1973, I saw that George Clooney had done it as a mini-series in 2019. Watching the first episode, I realized it could never work. For example, one of the funniest scenes in the book is the argument between Yossarian and Col. Scheisskopf's wife, with whom he is having an affair, about God. The scene is funny in the book because of how long the argument goes on. They couldn't let it go on at such length in the movie, as it would eat up too much time, but by truncating it it is no longer memorable. Also a problem is that in the novel, the war serves mostly as a backdrop to the interplay of the eccentric characters and the absurd, paradox-laden dialogs between them. In film, you need to see action, so Clooney's mini-series focuses too much on the war itself, on events.
The film of The Road is as good as McCarthy's novel. The film Forrest Gump is much better than the novel which it was based. Kubrick's The Shining was better than Stephen King's novel, which King could never acknowledge, going so far as to authorize a more literal --and terrible--TV adaptation of his book.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @JimDandy
“The scene is funny in the book because of how long the argument goes on. They couldn’t let it go on at such length in the movie, as it would eat up too much time, but by truncating it it is no longer memorable.”
Theoretically agree, but also disagree. In film you can “show” the audience the facial expressions, the body language and movement, the emotional states of both characters–the results of continually arguing back and forth (even if truncated) and therefore the audience will understand and “get” that two characters are having an argument. Not that difficult to show on film.
It’s like, you don’t have to show arguing back and forth, and on and on for minutes on end (referring here to like, say, 10+ minutes on end, for an example). In film, the point is made quicker.
It used to be (or perhaps it still is) that a single page of dialogue equates to about a minute on screen time. So obviously pages and pages of just arguing back and forth would be ridiculous. And after all, human nature is that some readers would tend to skim thru the pages to get to the larger point anyway. Some authors, admittedly, don’t know when to use the benefits of an editor and go, “No! ‘obviously’ I have to write a thousand pages to make the larger point of just cause! Just go with it, dude!”–Even though the story could’ve better been told in say, about 350-400 pages. That’s one reason why editors do exist–to shorten the novel and remove redundancies.
How many pages does a mature reader really need to read to figure out that two characters are having an argument? Not that many.
In film, keep it moving and use what works to further the narrative. And of course, don’t bore the audience. This isn’t rocket science.
The elliptical arguments in Catch 22, of which there are many, are only funny because they go on so long. The fact that the gist of those arguments could be communicated in a minute or two is not the point. It is a type of escalation humor. The Monty Python sketch "The Cheese Shop" is a perfect example. It could have communicated the fact that the cheese shop doesn't actually have any cheese in less than a minute. It's the lengthy playing out of the situation that is so absurd and funny.
Minoritarianism is incompatible with any form of continuing civilization. But the immigration zealots make this point in bright neon lights with fireworks. It's explicitly a policy of national destruction. This is not some routine contentious policy debate like Vietnam, Iraq or socialized medicine. It is existential. "Separation" is saying "we can't live with this". And ergo focuses the debate precisely on that "existential" point.2) exposes the parasite/host relationship
The Parasite Party's "coalition of the fringes" is essentially a parasitic coalition. They need us we don't need them. This is true whether you're talking about the high-end--Jews, good-whites in finance, lawyering, academia, or the middle tier public sector/public funded bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and assorted trouble-makers or the welfare class and criminal class blacks.(Wisconsin's sort of my "go to" for explaining this. The Democrat pieces like the good-whites in Madison or the blacks in north Milwaukee require the boring productive white-bread farmers and factory workers to fund their project. Cut off from the rest of Wisconsin ... those places--even high-income ones like Madison--do not work.)The minoritarian narrative was built around "slavery" ... "racism!". But the actual parasite/host relationship is actually the other way. Normal Americans simply do not need the "coalition of the fringes" people--at all. But the coalition of the fringes people are still very much need a big prosperous batch of normie productive Americans to provide them the their loot. We are their "serfs".Talking "separation" starts unmasking the fundamental parasitism driving minoritarianism and in doing so debunks its narrative.~Furthermore, "separation politics" lets us start actually working on immediate "separationist" solutions. "Mini-separation" if you will.1) School choice.
Making it easier for normie parents the chance to educate their children as they see fit. And critically, breaking the public school behemoth which indoctrinates normie children and is a critical leg of the Parasite Party patronage/activism machine.2) Separate communities.
States could allow/encourage separate explicitly "closed communities" that are allowed to enforce a border--refuse admittance. Normies could build non-infiltrateable communities.There's at least a handful of "separationist" style policies like this that states--and communities where states energize it--can start doing to help normies be able to live like normies ... right now! And the debate and contention over them ... is good. It highlights the essential issues noted above.~~~Your "current legal" is doing all your heavy lifting here to make this true. Otherwise this is just "No, it can't work!" skirt cluthing.
An actual separation program someplace like Sweden wouldn't be that difficult at all. Difficulty varies in various European nations. America is more difficult but hardly impossible. I've outlined how it could work a few times before. Technically, it is not that difficult. (I'll try and circle back to this and explain it yet again.) But the important point, is that you aren't waving a "magic wand" and trying to sell some separationist solution in one go. The important point is that you start talking separation and build a separationist politics. And that that process--talking about it--works in favor of exposing and debunking the minoritarian ideology, works in favor of politics getting better for normie Americans.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Muggles, @Hypnotoad666
The Assembly has just passed an anti-DEI amendment. The Senate may, too. Because it’s a constitutional amendment, it bypasses the governor and goes right to the voters.
Wisconsin Assembly passes constitutional amendment to limit diversity efforts
“just as predatory as Germany, just not as big or strong.”
Really? you’re gonna claim it was JUST AS predatory as Germany and then complain about comprehension? Look, no reasonable person would argue with some “no one was completely pure” bit of windbaggery, or some wishy-washy tripe like that, given Poland’s decision to take a chunk of Poland once Hitler decided to swipe his portion was realpolitik at a pretty sleazy level, but claiming they were “just as predatory” is you being… just an ass. Well before Hitler came to power (e.g. rape of Belgium) Germany made it clear that its predation and its so-called “blitzkrieg” were of a kind the world had never before witnessed.
JUST AS predatory? What does idiocy like that remind me of? Oh yeah, what about that pathetic loser who compares his legal troubles to what Navalny went through. Talk about not comprehending.
It’s funny no one has mentioned yet that Bulgakov was born, raised and graduated university in Kiev*.
*Pronounced “Kiev” or “Keeeeeev”, depending on how much of a good boy you are.
poultrychef:https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kf8XzD-xVGc/maxresdefault.jpg
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https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-taixn69rog/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/26644/809820/123825__95152.1637649179.jpg?c=1
OT: illegals not just for southern border states any more:
Michigan asks residents to help house, settle migrants amid crisis at border
“Michigan is asking residents to help house migrants in their homes and help resettle them into society as the crisis at the southern border continues…
“The migrants will come from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all points of origin where many have been hoping to apply for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
I believe Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, but he might have been ethnically Russian.
The novel Shane was the stuff of natural fascism: Shane was a strapping 6-feet tall, with dark hair, and was superhuman. Conversely, in the year of casting against type (1953; see Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity), the Super Chief, George Stevens, cast blonde, slender, 5’5” Alan Ladd as Shane, who in this incarnation was vulnerable. In the end, Shane, though victorious, has been wounded by a back-shooter, and his fate is ambiguous. He refuses to go back to the Starretts’ house for Marian to treat him, because it’s time to go, and Shane is one end of an unconsummated love triangle with Marian and Joe Starrett. And so, we get one of the most famous (and oft parodied) endings of all time, as little Joey Starrett implores him to come back.
The ending is so towering because Laddie plumbed previously untapped levels of talent, Vic Young’s music gave him a proper send-off, and little Brandon de Wilde was sensational as Little Joey.
And, of course, the Super Chief was at the peak of his powers.
In Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), Carl Foreman was working off John W. Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star,” which was no great shakes. However, Foreman had seen a brilliant, 20th Century Fox Henry King Western, The Gunfighter (1950), which had made the ticking clock a central motif. Time was running out on the eponymous protagonist, Jimmie Ringo (in a laughable attempt at uglying up the prettiest face in Hollywood, Greg Peck).
But in addition to a great comeback performance by Coop, and a brilliant script by Foreman, High Noon has an amazing theme song and score by Tiomkin, with lyrics by Ned Washington (which google's ai butchered, turning “or his’n” into “or his”), which set up the whole story in the first five minutes, thereby transcending pictures’ fundamental words/images conflict....Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Reg Cæsar
He may have been “vulnerable” and less than manly in other ways, but he hardly deserves the E in blonde! (Did you know he was the father-in-law of Cheryl?)
Russian missiles hit a shopping mall in Tiomkin’s hometown in Ukraine in 2022. And I’d like to know how an Irish family like Ned’s got the name Washington.
OT but does anyone happen to know stats on how many women are using the omnipresent sports gambling apps? I know it’s mostly men. The manner in which gambling addicted women treat their children is quite something if you’ve never witnessed it.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
That’s actually the point. But since you are programmed to immediately go into knee-jerk deep state propaganda mode you missed it.
Why does the NYT need to add the modifier “full scale”? What’s the quibbling distinction between a regular “invasion” and “full scale” one? Are they really sure it wasn’t a 3/4 or 4/5 scale invasion?
This is one reason why the NYT is unreadably annoying. Whatever they are writing about is just an excuse for a labored effort to recite certain propaganda terms while making equally labored efforts to avoid using direct but inconvenient words.
HANK GO TO BED.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/freeways/#comment-6420145Replies: @Jack D
I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12 and I have no idea what you are talking about.
Rispetti la donne.
Since there was no victim and no harm to anyone, the fine is infinity times the actual damages. I’d say that’s excessive.
Just, films are motion pictures with music and words combined. And most verbal passages cannot be filmed- especially if they include ideas. Try to adapt Biblical "Ecclesiastes" to the screen. Then, even without ideas, words' arrangement may convey something that one cannot put on the screen.
Take the penultimate chapter ending of Flaubert's "Sentimental Education", when old & crushed lovers part, leaving us with their unconsumed love and unlived lives"And this was all"- as the final anticlimactic climax cannot be filmed.
Simply, a novel/story has much more developed language to convey almost everything, unlike film language.
Except visual action & that's why Jaws, for instance, is better than the book. Because to see all that shark jaw-jawing is not the same as to read about it.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Ironically, what you blockquoted is almost exactly like a screenplay and could easily be filmed to convey the author’s intended plot, meaning, and emotion. In fact, the (bad translation?) ‘on-the-nose’ monologue can be excised entirely, with much improvement.
I'd love to know more about it.
A musician who worked with the Stones and whom I spoke to about Sympathy For The Devil said: Jagger scribbled maybe a few words about this stuff on a piece of paper. But the song was written by a mule - a hired hand...
As I said: I would love to know more about this subject.
(A phantsy of mine: Tom Stoppard helped the Stones out with the lyrics...).Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @The Germ Theory of Disease
One of the things about “Sympathy” was…
Charlie Watts (the drummer) was interviewed about it years later, and he said basically: Mick wrote the thing as a ballad on an acoustic guitar, but then we knocked the hell out of ourselves trying to figure out how to record it — we tried it as R n B, as punk rock, as classical, as big-band jazz, we tried everything, but nothing was working, but we still had faith in the song. Finally in frustration at 4 in the morning, I put down this sort of samba beat, and everybody said That’s it! That’s how it works!
Yeah I know that whole 4 in the morning thing.
***the Faust-museum in Knittlingen - a little village, 3 km away from Bretten where there is a Melanchthon museum: Faust and Melanchthon lived in this neck of Badenia at about the same time. The one doing alchemy and: Performing spooky tricks at fairs ! and speculating the elements (Faust) - his contemporary Philipp Melanchthon (latin for his original name: Black Earth german: Schwarzerd...) as a kid already so awe-inducing bright, that he was brought to his uncle, the renaissance-man (know it all...) Reuchlin in nearby Pforzheim (the gold-bracelet and diamond town...). He studied for some years with Reuchlin, went to the university in Heidelberg and soon - became what many called: Luther's brain (his language- and thepology-thought-processor: Melanchthon was kinda perfect in all languages Martin Luther needed - and Luther acknowleged that).Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
You forget that England ruled Ireland for some time (Cromwell seized it). The policy was to send Englishmen there to try and Anglicize it. They did succeed in getting the Irish to speak English (same with the Scottish and Welsh).
So yes there are people with English names born and raised in Ireland. (They were usually Protestant.)
Ireland was able to shake off English rule after WW 1 devastated Europe. All but a few counties in North Ireland (the so called Scots Irish).
"In May 1169, Anglo-Norman mercenaries landed in Ireland at the request of Diarmait mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurragh), the deposed King of Leinster, who sought their help in regaining his kingship."
In 1169, England and Wales was very much under Norman control. Note that it was to Aquitaine that Dermot looked for help (Henry II ruled most of France as well as England and Wales), yet the French don't get stick for the conquest.Cromwell's misdeeds at Drogheda were half a millennium later, in 1649. In fact Cromwell is closer to our present day than he is to the Norman conquest of Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Ascendancy
The Hearsts were Ulster Scots, who are typically Presbyterian-- while being less privileged than Wellingtons, would nevertheless be included in even a narrow definition of "WASP".
Smashing early life on Michael Lockshin.
Supports Ukraine, you don’t say?
Ok, I apologize to you, to Larry in SF, and to Bulgakov. Maybe I’ll give him another try.
I read Michael Glenny's translation into English because I was warned that other translations, including the more recent ones, aren't as good in bringing through the humour.Replies: @International Jew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdRkhzDmxvY
Or take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ending.
The Star-child scene is idiotic.
We are to believe that the guy was transformed into some kind of star-god who has will & paraphysical powers. And this is- a star. With a developed fetus inside (at least, that’s how we know that this transformed guy has become a humanoid super-physical star). Can you get more nonsensical than that? Stars are just stars. There is nothing within, or around them, that is remotely human, or “alive” (any form of life imaginable included). Stars have no will, intelligence, identity, power, … nothing.
I get that Kubrick/Clarke wanted that guy to undergo transformation into a god-like supra-physical being transcending ordinary 3+1 universe. I understand their intention & accept it. But: a) this is not supra-physical existence, Star-child being some extremely weird star in physical universe, b) fetal phase is ultimately comical, c) they should have presented some kind of god-like being our guy has become outside of space-time & acting on it from beyond & “above”, d) the fetal stuff makes it all hilarious. He should have become a hyper- humanoid being with traces of humanity, but, basically- a god beyond space-time.So, this legendary scene is, in my view, completely botched.
They failed, but the public & reviewers were just transfixed by unexpectedness, so they uncritically accepted this anti-climax as the climax.
An author more intelligent than Clarke/Kubrick would have ended it better.Replies: @Anon, @Yngvar
Please, please, just shut up. This is unbearable.
After rereading Catch 22, which was unsuccessfully brought to film by Mike Nichols in 1973, I saw that George Clooney had done it as a mini-series in 2019. Watching the first episode, I realized it could never work. For example, one of the funniest scenes in the book is the argument between Yossarian and Col. Scheisskopf's wife, with whom he is having an affair, about God. The scene is funny in the book because of how long the argument goes on. They couldn't let it go on at such length in the movie, as it would eat up too much time, but by truncating it it is no longer memorable. Also a problem is that in the novel, the war serves mostly as a backdrop to the interplay of the eccentric characters and the absurd, paradox-laden dialogs between them. In film, you need to see action, so Clooney's mini-series focuses too much on the war itself, on events.
The film of The Road is as good as McCarthy's novel. The film Forrest Gump is much better than the novel which it was based. Kubrick's The Shining was better than Stephen King's novel, which King could never acknowledge, going so far as to authorize a more literal --and terrible--TV adaptation of his book.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi, @JimDandy
No Country For Old Men is actually an excellent novel, and a very good film.
The right could attract many of this latter group if they tried, but they don't. Not only do they ride hobby horses that don't resonate with most people (make abortion illegal, for example), they hate and drive away those who are, or could be convinced to be, allies: white women (especially well-educated professionals and those serving in the armed forces), Jews, American Indians, Californians, West Virginians, Hollywood, the military (for some reason most especially naval aviators), pro-Ukrainians, billionaires, Walmart shoppers, Starbucks baristas, doctors, non-pro-lifers (those who have no particular opinion on abortion but don't want it banned), and of course conservative non-whites, in particular conservative blacks. You name the group and the right sneers at, puts down and hates it.
No wonder the right never win. They don't really want to. They prefer to make the welkin ring with their pullulating yodels of resentment rather than gain power and have to actually make happen what they say they want to happen.
Go ahead, Poindexters of Unz, mark this comment "troll." It will only prove my point. You could actually achieve many of your goals if you would only look in the mirror, think about what you say and how it repels, drives away, many potential allies. And also makes you look like unpleasant, whining losers. Which for the last couple of generations you have been. And no one likes a loser.Replies: @Mark G., @Stripes Duncan
This is retarded. Common cause requires common ground. Those societies are strongest which are the least up their own asses, hell-bent on all going in their own direction. What are the ties that are going to bind Injuns, the Scots-Irish, billionaires, baristas, and fucking tailhook pilots? Don’t leave us to speculate. Take us all the way home, Professor.
Your argument boils down to us needing to find the strength in diversity. Excuse me whilst I guffaw.
They develop an elegant suggestive/seductive mood by adding a latin groove to the country stomp they started out with anfd thus – transform it into something very close to the Devil Mephisto in Goethes Faust – and wonders over wonders: This is exactly how Bulgakov saw his Master too – which is
no wonder since Master and Margherita was intended by Bulgakov as a russian/bolshewik version of Goethes Faust.
German wikipedia has the details nicley sorted out:
Bulgakov already refers to Goethe’s Faust in the motto. It is said:“Well then, who are you? – A part of that power that always wants evil and always creates good.”
This refers to Voland, and this is the name Mephistopheles gives himself in the Walpurgis Night scene:
“Mephistopheles: What! already carried away there? I’ll have to use house rules. Place! Junker Voland is coming. Place! sweet mob, space!”
Similarly, the Master is a reference to Faust and Margarita is an embodiment of Gretchen, whose name is a pet form of Margarethe. The plot of the novel takes up Goethe’s work in various ways and parodies it or uses it for parody. For example, the Master’s pact with Satan can be read as a Faustian pact or the rescue of the Master and Margarita as a reference to the ending of Faust I.
Numerous references can also be identified on a symbolic level: For example, the poodle motif appears several times (Voland’s walking stick, Margarita necklace, motif on the pillow). The ball is a variation on the Walpurgis Night theme.
Are you reading in Russian or English? I can’t read Russian.
I read Michael Glenny’s translation into English because I was warned that other translations, including the more recent ones, aren’t as good in bringing through the humour.
Of course your multiplicative approach is logically unassailable in the case of a nuisance suit. But nuisance suits get settled, client grumbling, all the time. It is necessary, for 8th Amendment purposes, to know the approximate dollar amount that typically would have made this kind of nuisance suit go away, if the defendant had not been Mr. Trump. I predict the “Excessiveness” of the fine will ultimately be determined by Scotus’s so-called “in-house fact finding.” Specifically, Scotus will do fact research, and determine the typical “make it go away” range for a case like this – – a rich defendant, but no one was harmed.
Putin left out the fact that Hitler had torn up the Munich Agreement when he occupied Czechia on March 15, 1939. Talking about the Danzig affair without tying it into Sudetenland, Munich and Czechia is simply a distortion. Poland knew in the summer of 1939 that any agreement which signed over Danzig was worthless. He could simply have signed a deal to improve his strategic position over Poland and then occupy the country less than 6 months later, exactly as he had done with Czechia. That was why the Poles did not accept any such deals. Putin is simply distorting the record for political reasons.
The central thing about high imaginative literature is this: the peak in major works is irradiation of the sublime (I know it sounds preposterous, just..). For instance (I don’t read fiction anymore, so I’m writing from memory), this is what I felt, elation, a sort of electric current rushing through my body..when I read (had read): great triumphant Clytemnestra’s speech over her murdered husband’s body in Aeschylus; core teaching about the triad of Man-Earth-Heaven in The Doctrine of the Mean of the Confucian canon; great Socrates’ prophetic & visionary oratory on the immortality of soul in Phaedo; Macbeth’s hallucinatory speech when he is in the final phase of his doom; a few pages in Proust’s The Fugitive, located in Venice, when the Narrator, upon receiving a telegram & wrongly assuming that Albertine may be alive, receives an epiphany that he’s been “cured” of jealousy & love, and has definitely died to his former self & youth; Ilyushechka’s dying & death in The Brothers Karamazov; castration & agonising death of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August; final two pages in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; the execution of Billy Budd; the last stand of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat; ….
These are high sublime epiphanies, burnt into protoplasm of my inner being I’ll never forget. It is the fusion of heart, mind & spirit that gives them lasting value, rendering much of other issues superfluous or of secondary importance.
Film is intrinsically limited, as German theorist Heinrich Wölfflin speculated: Film is a picture book of life for the illiterate. It cannot achieve peak experience of transformation of a viewer’s consciousness like high literature can. In this respect, it is no different from the comics.
Any movie is always, when it comes to “high” or canonical literature, something of a sketchy rendering for masses.
It may present images in motion combined with words & music, but it cannot produce the adequate psychological effect. Of course, one should stress: “classics” don’t work at their intended, high sublime level for most readers. You get it or not, depending on the person.
I dunno whether or not your thoughts on film are right. I really dunno. My most beloved films come close to my experiences I had with the novel. - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Oppenheimer and - - - Im Laufe der Zeit by Wim Wenders (La Maman et la Putin/Jean Eustache) Casablanca, Barry Lyndon, The Maltese Falcon, the Coen Brother's True Grit and Michael Llewyn, Buster Keaton's The General; Fritz Lang's Metropolis) - all impressed me lastingly and deeply.
Film is farther away from one's own fantasies/ideas, that is for sure. A work of literary fiction depends much more on one's own mind to come to life and that is indeed a very personal thing.
I find myself writing and talking much more about books than about movies: This is also a fact.
All in all I'd still say that I don't really know. I still read some fiction. Last year I wrote a 89-X-posts piece about Goethe's late novel Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre - and I loved that - and a few hundred people read it, day after day, for almost threee months! - I started the same endeavor about Jean Paul's TITAN - but this one I did not translate so far (the Goethe posts I made in German and English).
I couldn' think of a movie that I would like to write 89 posts about.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @J.Ross
I never intended to hurt idol worshippers’ feelings.
So yes there are people with English names born and raised in Ireland. (They were usually Protestant.)
Ireland was able to shake off English rule after WW 1 devastated Europe. All but a few counties in North Ireland (the so called Scots Irish).Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
I think it was Wellington who said of his Irish birth “if a man is born in a stable, it does not make him a horse“.
It was actually the Normans who seized Ireland rather than the English, when an Irish chief asked for Norman help in his wars against other Irish chiefs.
“In May 1169, Anglo-Norman mercenaries landed in Ireland at the request of Diarmait mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurragh), the deposed King of Leinster, who sought their help in regaining his kingship.”
In 1169, England and Wales was very much under Norman control. Note that it was to Aquitaine that Dermot looked for help (Henry II ruled most of France as well as England and Wales), yet the French don’t get stick for the conquest.
Cromwell’s misdeeds at Drogheda were half a millennium later, in 1649. In fact Cromwell is closer to our present day than he is to the Norman conquest of Ireland.
I read Michael Glenny's translation into English because I was warned that other translations, including the more recent ones, aren't as good in bringing through the humour.Replies: @International Jew
Russian. But that could be part of the problem as Bulgakov’s Russian is difficult, and therefore tiring.
Fantasy (including fantastic realism and science fiction) is always harder in a language you don’t know all that well, because when you hit an unfamiliar word you have fewer constraints to help you guess.
All Orthodox & Muslim cultures share:
a) pre-rational public discourse, mythological approach & logical impotence
b) emo blather in public talk, even among academicians
c) disregard for empirical facts
d) collective psychological immaturity & infantile world-view
With or without censorship, both academics & garbage collectors.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @AndrewR
How are those criteria not applicable to Anglo cultures?
Because when you are having a serious conversation with a prominent intellectual figure in the Anglo world on a delicate topic, you won’t encounter stubborn insistence on completely irrational & empirically refutable nonsense.
For instance, there is not a single Amy Wax, Jared Taylor, Charles Murray… in the Serbian world. Some equivalent would be English and American top intellectual figures claiming that Gothic architecture began in England, that some English scribblers in the 16th C invented European novel- and not Cervantes- or that the American West in the 1880s was an industrial powerhouse.
And that this is the universally accepted sincere & authentic world-view among Anglo whites, rooted in history & permeating everything in the past 100 years & not the result of media manipulation, hypocrisy & decadent societal trends.
Yes, I’ve seen it. Used to go to the CT casinos with my wife and mother-in-law. Neither I nor my wife have any interest in gambling so we would usually just read on a bench outside the slots parlor and a few times there was some 5-ish year old Asian child/ren left out in the corridor playing with legos or whatever.
I’m kind of surprised that no one has mentioned it, but The Godfather was a much better movie than the book, IMO.
You see, in the latest iteration of Spiderman, Spiderman’s weakness is getting hit by a car.
Rispetti la donne.
Lookit, if you really want a good inside critique of Stalinism, then read Nadezhda Mandelstam, "Hope Against Hope." Or la goddess Akhmatova. Or even Gerhardie, FFS. Meantime, for all his capricious occasional broad-minded-ness, Stalin remains the guy who had Vsevolod Meyerhold tortured and killed for no reason.
* * *
OT, but not being a sports-watching guy, I nevertheless got dragged to a hockey-watching party for the big Rangers/Islanders stadium game, which I must admit was epic in its way. Astounded they actually filled the whole stadium, when hockey is a game which usually only fills MSG roughly 30k.
Anyway for me, battle-scarred avant-gardist that I am, was a commercial which used as its soundtrack "I'll Be Your Mirror" from the ferociously avant super-group The Velvet Underground. Couldn't believe me ears: that is HOW f#cking old I am.
Not a sports guy at all, in fact an anti-sports guy, but when I was a kid for weird sociological reasons I got dragged into playing pretty much every sport -- even boxing!#! -- and even though I totally sucked at every single one of 'em, at least I can say I did it. My favorite torture was ice hockey, which I got dragooned into doing at 3 AM at Sky Rink pickup games courtesy of my older brother who was an athletic star, who insisted that the geeky nerd come along and play because it would "build character". Which I still do not possess.
Anyway of all the dopey team sports, aside from baseball which is sublime and more on the level of chess, I think ice hockey is the best: the elegance and precision of ballet, the technological (skating/stick handling) fury of NASA, and the brute zaniness of kick-boxing, all without the dumb grandiosity of bakkaball. Plus, buncha white guys for a friggin' change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5STk2JtkRyo&list=RDMM&index=24Replies: @Thea, @Ganderson
Ahh, the Sky Rink. Many fond memories of playing there. Only rink I’ve played in where I had to ride the elevator up, what, 16 floors? Because I’m a Minnesotan it was assumed that I was good- I was a bitter disappointment to the lads who played there…
We wore jumbled jerseys which all had feather-Indian logos, and for score-keeping purposes we called ourselves "The, Um, Indian Guys." Eheu fugaces labuntur anni....
It’s like, you don’t have to show arguing back and forth, and on and on for minutes on end…. In film, the point is made quicker.
The elliptical arguments in Catch 22, of which there are many, are only funny because they go on so long. The fact that the gist of those arguments could be communicated in a minute or two is not the point. It is a type of escalation humor. The Monty Python sketch “The Cheese Shop” is a perfect example. It could have communicated the fact that the cheese shop doesn’t actually have any cheese in less than a minute. It’s the lengthy playing out of the situation that is so absurd and funny.
New York's convicted Donald Trump for a "crime" that exists under New York law but in no other state, i.e., he was convicted of fraud for overvaluing (in the state's opinion) the value of real estate on a loan application despite the fact that a.) the lender does not consider the value the borrower states in deciding whether to make the loan and b.) the lender said Trump's assets were sufficient to assure them he would repay it, which he did. He was convicted of fraud although no fraud occurred.Hochul was telling other businessmen not to worry because this obscure law, with which no one has previously been charged under such circumstances, is being used only against Donald Trump. It is a sort of Bill of Attainder. No one who is not Donald Trump need worry. Only, how can they not worry when a state supports this level of corruption? Watch more corporations move to safer climes.Replies: @Prester John, @SafeNow, @Joe Joe
Didn’t NY also retroactively change the law so that Trump could be prosecuted for “hush money payments to a porn star” well after statute of limitations expired???
Specifically, Scotus will do fact research, and determine the typical “make it go away” range for a case like this
SCOTUS should review the law upon which this case was brought, which AFAIK exists in no state but New York. This law allows someone to be charged with fraud for putting an incorrect value of a property into a legal document, whether or not any fraud was intended or occurred. Note that it doesn’t matter whether the amount undervalues or overvalues a property, it still constitutes fraud. Real estate value is quite subjective and variable. The New York law should be declared unconstitutional.
The podcaster Lionel, a lawyer and former DA, has explained this absurd situation at length.
I agree. But I really liked the book, too. Coppola was pretty derisive of it–called it pulp, etc. I think it was pretty damned good popular fiction.
Paul Verhoeven trivia:
1. He directed the shower scene in “Starship Troopers” in the nude to make his cast feel more comfortable.
2. He was the only non-academic voting member of the Jesus Seminar, a project that produced editions of the New Testament gospels (and the Gospel of Thomas) that were color coded to indicate the words that the historical Jesus actually said and the things that he actually did.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
I’m guessing he didn’t do the Jesus Seminar in the nude. Though that might change in his film version. I wonder who he’d ask to play Morna Hooker. (No, she wasn’t in the Seminar, and was likely a critic, but you can’t leave a great name like Morna Hooker out of your story.)
DGMW, the book was pretty good (the sub plot about the girl who gets surgery to allow her to have orgasms was a bit weird and not really material to the main plot). I’m always a bit dismissive of those types of comments (regarding FFC’s) made in later years, because there’s a really good chance that the comment is presented way out of context. IIRC for years it was promoted that Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw were bitter enemies because each had made a couple of observations about the other during interviews following the making of Jaws that were less than completely flattering and or celebratory. It was all BS of course, as watching any number of full interviews with either of them discredits that presumption.
*Pronounced "Kiev" or "Keeeeeev", depending on how much of a good boy you are.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
I go with the
poultrychef:It's bizarre and tragic that the Jews were allowed to gain control of American media, particularly television: "ABC (Leonard Goldenson), CBS (William Samuel Paley) and NBC (David Sarnoff)".[1] Once these Jews gained control of media they gained control of the American mind - and thereby the whole Western world.
Presumably if they'd been challenged on antitrust grounds SCOTUS would have thrown the case out because "they have three different owners" and thus "don't form a monopoly." While it's true that they were controlled by three different men (Goldenson, Paley and Sarnoff) all three men belonged to the same tiny tribe and pushed the same tribal interests at the expense of the 98% of the rest of the population. We're seeing the consequences of their control play out in the world today with, for example, the complete emasculation of white Christendom against the threat of mass immigration and its total unquestioning support of the supremacist ethnostate of Israel even though such support is entirely contrary to American interests (and purported "values" such as the "evils of ethnostates") - not to mention objective morality.
Antitrust laws which fail to factor in ethnic cartelization by greenbeard ethnic nepotists are toothless in the face of tribal peoples like Jews.
Why do white gentiles fail to grasp that other groups - tribal groups like Jews and Indian Subcontinentals - are just different than them, and that that their laws must be adapted to account for these differences? Part of the reason they continue fail to grasp this is that it's a fact the recognition of which has been rendered taboo by Jewish media itself.
Of course, Jews don't necessarily need to directly own media to exert influence over it. Just witness the sad case of Elon Musk who, after initially promising free speech on X and that "all legal speech would be permitted" has recently buckled under Jewish pressure and under demands that Jews be given special treatment. He has thus reneged on all his free speech promises to satisfy ethnic activists like Bill Ackman and Jonathan Greenblatt.
Jewish media ownership is at the absolute heart of all of the West's problems. It's why nobody can even discuss what those problems are. Jewish media control should be the central focus of everyone who desires to save the West from its impending destruction. It should also be the central focus of everyone who seeks to rescue the Palestinians and bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East.
[1] https://www.unz.com/estriker/americas-church-the-invention-of-the-evangelical-christian-movement/Replies: @Jeremiah B Leonard, @Anonymous
I am mystified that you believe it is “bizarre and tragic that Jews were allowed to gain control.”
Judaism is a collection of practices which produces eugenic effects among its adherents, and these adherents take their identities more seriously than the goyim take their’s. Some of these adherents stray away from their Jewish sun, and into wider society. Then, it is only a matter of time for many Jews to assume power and become the movers & shakers, active in the lives of your friends and family.
Jews were “allowed” because the wider society was asleep at the wheel.
YOUR WORDS WHICH INSPIRED MY RESPONSE: “It’s bizarre and tragic that the Jews were allowed to gain control of American media, particularly television: “ABC (Leonard Goldenson), CBS (William Samuel Paley) and NBC (David Sarnoff)”.[1] Once these Jews gained control of media they gained control of the American mind – and thereby the whole Western world.”
Minoritarianism is incompatible with any form of continuing civilization. But the immigration zealots make this point in bright neon lights with fireworks. It's explicitly a policy of national destruction. This is not some routine contentious policy debate like Vietnam, Iraq or socialized medicine. It is existential. "Separation" is saying "we can't live with this". And ergo focuses the debate precisely on that "existential" point.2) exposes the parasite/host relationship
The Parasite Party's "coalition of the fringes" is essentially a parasitic coalition. They need us we don't need them. This is true whether you're talking about the high-end--Jews, good-whites in finance, lawyering, academia, or the middle tier public sector/public funded bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and assorted trouble-makers or the welfare class and criminal class blacks.(Wisconsin's sort of my "go to" for explaining this. The Democrat pieces like the good-whites in Madison or the blacks in north Milwaukee require the boring productive white-bread farmers and factory workers to fund their project. Cut off from the rest of Wisconsin ... those places--even high-income ones like Madison--do not work.)The minoritarian narrative was built around "slavery" ... "racism!". But the actual parasite/host relationship is actually the other way. Normal Americans simply do not need the "coalition of the fringes" people--at all. But the coalition of the fringes people are still very much need a big prosperous batch of normie productive Americans to provide them the their loot. We are their "serfs".Talking "separation" starts unmasking the fundamental parasitism driving minoritarianism and in doing so debunks its narrative.~Furthermore, "separation politics" lets us start actually working on immediate "separationist" solutions. "Mini-separation" if you will.1) School choice.
Making it easier for normie parents the chance to educate their children as they see fit. And critically, breaking the public school behemoth which indoctrinates normie children and is a critical leg of the Parasite Party patronage/activism machine.2) Separate communities.
States could allow/encourage separate explicitly "closed communities" that are allowed to enforce a border--refuse admittance. Normies could build non-infiltrateable communities.There's at least a handful of "separationist" style policies like this that states--and communities where states energize it--can start doing to help normies be able to live like normies ... right now! And the debate and contention over them ... is good. It highlights the essential issues noted above.~~~Your "current legal" is doing all your heavy lifting here to make this true. Otherwise this is just "No, it can't work!" skirt cluthing.
An actual separation program someplace like Sweden wouldn't be that difficult at all. Difficulty varies in various European nations. America is more difficult but hardly impossible. I've outlined how it could work a few times before. Technically, it is not that difficult. (I'll try and circle back to this and explain it yet again.) But the important point, is that you aren't waving a "magic wand" and trying to sell some separationist solution in one go. The important point is that you start talking separation and build a separationist politics. And that that process--talking about it--works in favor of exposing and debunking the minoritarian ideology, works in favor of politics getting better for normie Americans.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Muggles, @Hypnotoad666
You and some other replies to my comment accuse me of “blah, blah, blah” answers to our current situation.
Yet, in the end, you and others just wave the magic wand of “separatism” and essentially do the same thing.
I was noting that convincing a large segment of the public was needed, not magic wand phrases.
Yet your separatism details are rather vague and lacking in specifics. Sure, a certain amount of regional and local differences can be done within a larger “state” context. But if that’s what you mean then you are just like the libertarians who say they should all move to NH and take over.
Okay. But this physical movement/separation is quite limited and boils down to local/regional affinity politics. Like the difference between California and Texas, for instance.
Okay. But the constant use of “separatism” as the conclusion to comments posted here turns out to be rather weak tea. Fine, because that is the only drink we have.
The “why” of separatism is key.
I prefer simply convincing/persuading the “thought leaders” and intelligent strata of society about the virtue of certain kinds of ideas and the badness of others. This has been done in the past but again, is no magic wand.
We are, I believe, at another turning point now. Wokeness is seeing fierce pushback. Let’s keep that up.
I’m not selling magic wands though. Frankly, the term “separatism” seems defeatist and a retreat from evil which you assume can be limited by some physical separation.
So blah-blah-blah is all that is left. The content of that, and the acceptance of that, is what is key.
Or we can just all move to Argentina and hope Melei can remake that place from a Peronist fascist/socialist basket case into some libertarian free market success story.
I am hopeful (a couple of libertarians I knew did buy property years ago in Uruguay) but I’m not condo shopping there yet.
Real life isn’t/wasn’t as important to you? Are you a cloistered monk or something?
His cited opinion in the present is useless: He was already an old man as film was getting started as a medium:
You write:
You appear to be begging the question from a hardcore “wordcel” perspective; perhaps images and sound have less effect on you because you have relatively inadequate sensory ‘receptors’.
Indeed…
Charlie Watts (the drummer) was interviewed about it years later, and he said basically: Mick wrote the thing as a ballad on an acoustic guitar, but then we knocked the hell out of ourselves trying to figure out how to record it -- we tried it as R n B, as punk rock, as classical, as big-band jazz, we tried everything, but nothing was working, but we still had faith in the song. Finally in frustration at 4 in the morning, I put down this sort of samba beat, and everybody said That's it! That's how it works!
Yeah I know that whole 4 in the morning thing.Replies: @Dieter Kief
Godard shows in One + One how they developed this Samba-groove – – – They were cool to the n-th degree doing that while cameras were rollin (ahh – The Rolling Stones – – – they have this stardom-filmstar-stuff already in their name – – – ). The devilish thing here is the casual, light-hearted, elegant, suggestive – if not: seductive… way in which – Mephisto’s thoughts are presented by the Stones (see my comment 158 about the Master and Magerita/ Goethe parallels. I was at a lecture at the Faust***-museum in Germany of a psychology professor, who has written a quite interesting book about Goethe and Faust and who spoke at some length about Faust and the Rolling Stones, but it turned out he knows just the wikipedia stuff about the Stones – and so he did not have too much to say in this regard, unfortunately.)
***the Faust-museum in Knittlingen – a little village, 3 km away from Bretten where there is a Melanchthon museum: Faust and Melanchthon lived in this neck of Badenia at about the same time. The one doing alchemy and: Performing spooky tricks at fairs ! and speculating the elements (Faust) – his contemporary Philipp Melanchthon (latin for his original name: Black Earth german: Schwarzerd…) as a kid already so awe-inducing bright, that he was brought to his uncle, the renaissance-man (know it all…) Reuchlin in nearby Pforzheim (the gold-bracelet and diamond town…). He studied for some years with Reuchlin, went to the university in Heidelberg and soon – became what many called: Luther’s brain (his language- and thepology-thought-processor: Melanchthon was kinda perfect in all languages Martin Luther needed – and Luther acknowleged that).
"Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it."
When it comes to Mephistopheles I'm more of a Kit Marlowe guy than a Goethe guy.Replies: @Dieter Kief
Interesting, thx.
I dunno whether or not your thoughts on film are right. I really dunno. My most beloved films come close to my experiences I had with the novel. – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Oppenheimer and – – – Im Laufe der Zeit by Wim Wenders (La Maman et la Putin/Jean Eustache) Casablanca, Barry Lyndon, The Maltese Falcon, the Coen Brother’s True Grit and Michael Llewyn, Buster Keaton’s The General; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) – all impressed me lastingly and deeply.
Film is farther away from one’s own fantasies/ideas, that is for sure. A work of literary fiction depends much more on one’s own mind to come to life and that is indeed a very personal thing.
I find myself writing and talking much more about books than about movies: This is also a fact.
All in all I’d still say that I don’t really know. I still read some fiction. Last year I wrote a 89-X-posts piece about Goethe’s late novel Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre – and I loved that – and a few hundred people read it, day after day, for almost threee months! – I started the same endeavor about Jean Paul’s TITAN – but this one I did not translate so far (the Goethe posts I made in German and English).
I couldn’ think of a movie that I would like to write 89 posts about.
Yeah, Puzo didn’t handle sex well. I suspect that was his marketing appeal to female readers who he thought were looking specifically for smut and fantasy fulfillment–a sad lady who is self-conscious about her big vagina finds ecstasy when she meets a mobster with a gigantic cock. Lol. Jaws (the novel) had some cringey attempts at sexiness, too.
The movie is about the freedom of an artist in an unfree world
Ya, Americans would not get it
Minoritarianism is incompatible with any form of continuing civilization. But the immigration zealots make this point in bright neon lights with fireworks. It's explicitly a policy of national destruction. This is not some routine contentious policy debate like Vietnam, Iraq or socialized medicine. It is existential. "Separation" is saying "we can't live with this". And ergo focuses the debate precisely on that "existential" point.2) exposes the parasite/host relationship
The Parasite Party's "coalition of the fringes" is essentially a parasitic coalition. They need us we don't need them. This is true whether you're talking about the high-end--Jews, good-whites in finance, lawyering, academia, or the middle tier public sector/public funded bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and assorted trouble-makers or the welfare class and criminal class blacks.(Wisconsin's sort of my "go to" for explaining this. The Democrat pieces like the good-whites in Madison or the blacks in north Milwaukee require the boring productive white-bread farmers and factory workers to fund their project. Cut off from the rest of Wisconsin ... those places--even high-income ones like Madison--do not work.)The minoritarian narrative was built around "slavery" ... "racism!". But the actual parasite/host relationship is actually the other way. Normal Americans simply do not need the "coalition of the fringes" people--at all. But the coalition of the fringes people are still very much need a big prosperous batch of normie productive Americans to provide them the their loot. We are their "serfs".Talking "separation" starts unmasking the fundamental parasitism driving minoritarianism and in doing so debunks its narrative.~Furthermore, "separation politics" lets us start actually working on immediate "separationist" solutions. "Mini-separation" if you will.1) School choice.
Making it easier for normie parents the chance to educate their children as they see fit. And critically, breaking the public school behemoth which indoctrinates normie children and is a critical leg of the Parasite Party patronage/activism machine.2) Separate communities.
States could allow/encourage separate explicitly "closed communities" that are allowed to enforce a border--refuse admittance. Normies could build non-infiltrateable communities.There's at least a handful of "separationist" style policies like this that states--and communities where states energize it--can start doing to help normies be able to live like normies ... right now! And the debate and contention over them ... is good. It highlights the essential issues noted above.~~~Your "current legal" is doing all your heavy lifting here to make this true. Otherwise this is just "No, it can't work!" skirt cluthing.
An actual separation program someplace like Sweden wouldn't be that difficult at all. Difficulty varies in various European nations. America is more difficult but hardly impossible. I've outlined how it could work a few times before. Technically, it is not that difficult. (I'll try and circle back to this and explain it yet again.) But the important point, is that you aren't waving a "magic wand" and trying to sell some separationist solution in one go. The important point is that you start talking separation and build a separationist politics. And that that process--talking about it--works in favor of exposing and debunking the minoritarian ideology, works in favor of politics getting better for normie Americans.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Muggles, @Hypnotoad666
I see your point. Basically, why not let people associate freely and create alternate non-woke/non-DEI institutions. They can vote with their wallets and their feet within the existing Constitutional framework.
Of course, the shrieking Libtard Corporate Media will do everything they can to delegitimize any talk of free association. But the good news is that their gatekeeper status is eroding fast due to their constant self-beclowning.
I dunno whether or not your thoughts on film are right. I really dunno. My most beloved films come close to my experiences I had with the novel. - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Oppenheimer and - - - Im Laufe der Zeit by Wim Wenders (La Maman et la Putin/Jean Eustache) Casablanca, Barry Lyndon, The Maltese Falcon, the Coen Brother's True Grit and Michael Llewyn, Buster Keaton's The General; Fritz Lang's Metropolis) - all impressed me lastingly and deeply.
Film is farther away from one's own fantasies/ideas, that is for sure. A work of literary fiction depends much more on one's own mind to come to life and that is indeed a very personal thing.
I find myself writing and talking much more about books than about movies: This is also a fact.
All in all I'd still say that I don't really know. I still read some fiction. Last year I wrote a 89-X-posts piece about Goethe's late novel Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre - and I loved that - and a few hundred people read it, day after day, for almost threee months! - I started the same endeavor about Jean Paul's TITAN - but this one I did not translate so far (the Goethe posts I made in German and English).
I couldn' think of a movie that I would like to write 89 posts about.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @J.Ross
It depends on many things. But- great works in words have founded cultures, religions, schools of thought, shaped the highest aesthetic experience, … As with films- no. Simply, judging from the depth & breadth of possible transmutation of consciousness one could, at least intermittently, experience savoring the greatest verbal-ideatic symphonies’ achievements by reading passages of arranged words, any film experience is necessarily limited and narrow.
What a movie can do is to transport you in the midst of a quasi-reality that is literally attacking your senses & your cognitive apparatus is virtually drowned in a visual-auditory hallucination that seems to be “real”- just remember the first scenes in “Saving Private Ryan” & the Normandy beaches. Any description of that in words would seem inadequate. Immediacy of an almost complete trance-like state & audio-visual bombardment of senses achieve such an effect perfectly.
Just- it expires after the bombardment is gone.
On the other hand, film language cannot convey insight, emotional-mental transformation or permanent change in a psyche literary (prophecy, philosophy, imaginative literature) works induce & implant into your mind. No film can impart the wealth of knowing the imaginary character’s inwardness – inner being, drives & vision of reality we absorb from literary works- say, great characters like Raskolnikov or Charlus. Film simply doesn’t possess the means to achieve that. Let alone epiphanies we find in Nietzsche or Virgil’s dying at the end of Broch’s masterwork.
In sum- words with power (to cite Northrop Frye) can change your being permanently by catapulting you, at least temporarily, in the realm of the superconsciousness & then implant a seed which may grow further in time.
Of course, things are frequently different with more “ordinary” & middle-brow works of fiction.
***the Faust-museum in Knittlingen - a little village, 3 km away from Bretten where there is a Melanchthon museum: Faust and Melanchthon lived in this neck of Badenia at about the same time. The one doing alchemy and: Performing spooky tricks at fairs ! and speculating the elements (Faust) - his contemporary Philipp Melanchthon (latin for his original name: Black Earth german: Schwarzerd...) as a kid already so awe-inducing bright, that he was brought to his uncle, the renaissance-man (know it all...) Reuchlin in nearby Pforzheim (the gold-bracelet and diamond town...). He studied for some years with Reuchlin, went to the university in Heidelberg and soon - became what many called: Luther's brain (his language- and thepology-thought-processor: Melanchthon was kinda perfect in all languages Martin Luther needed - and Luther acknowleged that).Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
“I do confess it, Faustus, and rejoice.”
“Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.”
When it comes to Mephistopheles I’m more of a Kit Marlowe guy than a Goethe guy.
The effect is: It is easier to come to grips with Marlowe's than with Goethe's Mephistopheles.
Goehte wanted just that. - And for good reasons. I htink he wanted to add soemthing to the centuries of Mephisto/Faust-approaches before him - and he accomplished that. In his play, the well respected scientist Faust is the one who commits on crime after the other - whereas - after closest inspection, you can't find anythning that Mephisto would have done wrong - except: Bringing people into situations in which they have to reflect about him. Elegant. - Like Mick Jagger's dance-moves...
I wonder: Did Mick Jagger know Marlowe's Faust from his school years? Was it on the curriculum?
Soldo (“Fisted by Foucault”) is hilarious as always describing the passing of Navalny.
Notice: Simplicissimus, the best writer on the Ukraine situation, subscribes to Soldo.
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-saint-alexei-patron?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
(Big Serge is very good too.)Replies: @J.Ross
The Killer Angels, more or less the inspiration for the film Gettysburg, is well worth reading or re-reading.
Yeah, that place was a blast. Our ad-hoc team used to wear fedoras (way back before a fedora was a stylistic hipster death-blow — I wore my dad’s) and skinny neck-ties instead of helmets. Our team song was “The Safety Dance”.
We wore jumbled jerseys which all had feather-Indian logos, and for score-keeping purposes we called ourselves “The, Um, Indian Guys.” Eheu fugaces labuntur anni….
It's bizarre and tragic that the Jews were allowed to gain control of American media, particularly television: "ABC (Leonard Goldenson), CBS (William Samuel Paley) and NBC (David Sarnoff)".[1] Once these Jews gained control of media they gained control of the American mind - and thereby the whole Western world.
Presumably if they'd been challenged on antitrust grounds SCOTUS would have thrown the case out because "they have three different owners" and thus "don't form a monopoly." While it's true that they were controlled by three different men (Goldenson, Paley and Sarnoff) all three men belonged to the same tiny tribe and pushed the same tribal interests at the expense of the 98% of the rest of the population. We're seeing the consequences of their control play out in the world today with, for example, the complete emasculation of white Christendom against the threat of mass immigration and its total unquestioning support of the supremacist ethnostate of Israel even though such support is entirely contrary to American interests (and purported "values" such as the "evils of ethnostates") - not to mention objective morality.
Antitrust laws which fail to factor in ethnic cartelization by greenbeard ethnic nepotists are toothless in the face of tribal peoples like Jews.
Why do white gentiles fail to grasp that other groups - tribal groups like Jews and Indian Subcontinentals - are just different than them, and that that their laws must be adapted to account for these differences? Part of the reason they continue fail to grasp this is that it's a fact the recognition of which has been rendered taboo by Jewish media itself.
Of course, Jews don't necessarily need to directly own media to exert influence over it. Just witness the sad case of Elon Musk who, after initially promising free speech on X and that "all legal speech would be permitted" has recently buckled under Jewish pressure and under demands that Jews be given special treatment. He has thus reneged on all his free speech promises to satisfy ethnic activists like Bill Ackman and Jonathan Greenblatt.
Jewish media ownership is at the absolute heart of all of the West's problems. It's why nobody can even discuss what those problems are. Jewish media control should be the central focus of everyone who desires to save the West from its impending destruction. It should also be the central focus of everyone who seeks to rescue the Palestinians and bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East.
[1] https://www.unz.com/estriker/americas-church-the-invention-of-the-evangelical-christian-movement/Replies: @Jeremiah B Leonard, @Anonymous
Mormons are much the same. Like Jews they’re paranoiacs who think ‘the gentiles’ are eternally conspiring against them.
There are way, way, more important things than that which most Americans will never be allowed to see.
e.g., Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz.
"Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it."
When it comes to Mephistopheles I'm more of a Kit Marlowe guy than a Goethe guy.Replies: @Dieter Kief
Marlowe is direct, whereas Goethe is palyful.
The effect is: It is easier to come to grips with Marlowe’s than with Goethe’s Mephistopheles.
Goehte wanted just that. – And for good reasons. I htink he wanted to add soemthing to the centuries of Mephisto/Faust-approaches before him – and he accomplished that. In his play, the well respected scientist Faust is the one who commits on crime after the other – whereas – after closest inspection, you can’t find anythning that Mephisto would have done wrong – except: Bringing people into situations in which they have to reflect about him. Elegant. – Like Mick Jagger’s dance-moves…
I wonder: Did Mick Jagger know Marlowe’s Faust from his school years? Was it on the curriculum?
e.g., Tucker Carlson's interview with Mike Benz.Replies: @vinteuil
It’s really quite amazing that we’ve now arrived at the point where Tucker Carlson, of all people, has become the radical skeptic, while Steve Sailer, of all people, has become the mouth of the conventional wisdom, when it comes to the Covid panic & the Ukraine scam.
I dunno whether or not your thoughts on film are right. I really dunno. My most beloved films come close to my experiences I had with the novel. - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Oppenheimer and - - - Im Laufe der Zeit by Wim Wenders (La Maman et la Putin/Jean Eustache) Casablanca, Barry Lyndon, The Maltese Falcon, the Coen Brother's True Grit and Michael Llewyn, Buster Keaton's The General; Fritz Lang's Metropolis) - all impressed me lastingly and deeply.
Film is farther away from one's own fantasies/ideas, that is for sure. A work of literary fiction depends much more on one's own mind to come to life and that is indeed a very personal thing.
I find myself writing and talking much more about books than about movies: This is also a fact.
All in all I'd still say that I don't really know. I still read some fiction. Last year I wrote a 89-X-posts piece about Goethe's late novel Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre - and I loved that - and a few hundred people read it, day after day, for almost threee months! - I started the same endeavor about Jean Paul's TITAN - but this one I did not translate so far (the Goethe posts I made in German and English).
I couldn' think of a movie that I would like to write 89 posts about.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @J.Ross
Have you read Bogmail by Patrick McGinley?
Ahhhh - Treasure Coast - - -Tom Kakonis (the most underrated US crime writer I know of (he is more of a novelist than a crime writer - this one is about - - - loss of faith and the substitutes it creates and about the dark triad-mindset getting a hold on some gangsters (etc. pp. - winter-weather in Florida!). Perfect.
Have you been keeping up, Jack? Look at the Marvel and Star Wars movies that in the name of wokeness are giving a big FU to their natural fan base and are flopping at the box office.Replies: @HA, @Anonymous
They’re not flopping, but it’s true that they’re not making as much money as they might. Hollywood is OK with that.
So yes there are people with English names born and raised in Ireland. (They were usually Protestant.)
Ireland was able to shake off English rule after WW 1 devastated Europe. All but a few counties in North Ireland (the so called Scots Irish).Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms
That was my point dear, Wellington was born to a privileged class in Ireland and British Empire, and would certainly be considered Anglo-Saxon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Ascendancy
The Hearsts were Ulster Scots, who are typically Presbyterian– while being less privileged than Wellingtons, would nevertheless be included in even a narrow definition of “WASP”.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
Well, for comparison, when the U.S. invaded Iraq – a much smaller and weaker country – in 1991 it did so with a million men.
For Round 2 in 2003 it still brought half a million men – over twice the number Putin sent into Ukraine in 2022.
But, this novel doesn't have much to offer to the heart & mind; its satire is a mild one; existentially- quasiphilosophically, it's weak.
I understand its status as a cult classic, but it is simply a good novel which is inferior to the best work of Leonid Leonov, who sank himself with his lapdoggery to Stalin.
On top of that- satirical novels don't age well.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @anonymous
It is rare to hear praise for Leonov. When I studied Russian in the 70s, my first teacher had a complete set of his published (in Moscow, using Finnish paper – if you know, you know) works in his office, and was working on , I think, a book about him (which was never published – back in the day, if a professor had tenure, he really had tenure, and did not have to publish anymore.). I assumed he (Leonov) was a guy who wrote a lot about the forestry industry, with a certain level of talent at pastiching better writers, such as Chekhov and Leskov. What do you like about his work? Was he a vile propagandist, in your opinion, or just someone who had a normal human fear of not being sufficiently supportive of the local dictator? Did he write quotable prose, or did he, while not saying anything very memorable, write books you thought worth reading?
For Round 2 in 2003 it still brought half a million men - over twice the number Putin sent into Ukraine in 2022.Replies: @HA
“Well, for comparison, when the U.S. invaded Iraq – a much smaller and weaker country – in 1991 it did so with a million men.”
How many men did the US bring to Panama to oust that “narco-maniac” Noriega? That seems like a more relevant comparison in terms of how Putin thought this whole thing would play out.
Lil’ BB later fired the entire FSB wing responsible for bribing and subverting Ukraine — that indicates he wasn’t too happy about their projections on how Ukraine would fall with hardly even a whimper, which is what led him to assume that 200K men would be enough to get the job done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdRkhzDmxvY
Or take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ending.
The Star-child scene is idiotic.
We are to believe that the guy was transformed into some kind of star-god who has will & paraphysical powers. And this is- a star. With a developed fetus inside (at least, that’s how we know that this transformed guy has become a humanoid super-physical star). Can you get more nonsensical than that? Stars are just stars. There is nothing within, or around them, that is remotely human, or “alive” (any form of life imaginable included). Stars have no will, intelligence, identity, power, … nothing.
I get that Kubrick/Clarke wanted that guy to undergo transformation into a god-like supra-physical being transcending ordinary 3+1 universe. I understand their intention & accept it. But: a) this is not supra-physical existence, Star-child being some extremely weird star in physical universe, b) fetal phase is ultimately comical, c) they should have presented some kind of god-like being our guy has become outside of space-time & acting on it from beyond & “above”, d) the fetal stuff makes it all hilarious. He should have become a hyper- humanoid being with traces of humanity, but, basically- a god beyond space-time.So, this legendary scene is, in my view, completely botched.
They failed, but the public & reviewers were just transfixed by unexpectedness, so they uncritically accepted this anti-climax as the climax.
An author more intelligent than Clarke/Kubrick would have ended it better.Replies: @Anon, @Yngvar
The Star-child symbolize the birth of the New Man.
2001: A Space Odyssey is an allegory about communism:
The monolith, and meeting it, symbolize the Marxist idea about progressive stages in human social evolution, the dialectical synthesis when society reach a higher civilizational plane.
The main character represents the Leninist idea of the communist vanguard (therefore named “Bowman”).
HAL is the symbolic embodiment of the bourgeois super-structure tying down man and preventing the full flourishing of the human potential.
The final scene is a metaphor for the evolution of man until he reach a higher state of consciousness; the New (Communist) Man is born.
And so on.
The movie is communist propaganda.
I’ve looked it up – sounds interesting. Thx.!
Ahhhh – Treasure Coast – – -Tom Kakonis (the most underrated US crime writer I know of (he is more of a novelist than a crime writer – this one is about – – – loss of faith and the substitutes it creates and about the dark triad-mindset getting a hold on some gangsters (etc. pp. – winter-weather in Florida!). Perfect.
Notice: Simplicissimus, the best writer on the Ukraine situation, subscribes to Soldo.
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-saint-alexei-patron?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2Replies: @Dieter Kief
Thx.
(Big Serge is very good too.)
(Big Serge is very good too.)Replies: @J.Ross
Yeah, I subscribe to him too, plus Marc Andreesen, who only writes like three times a year.
Hopefully, the movie will be available to English speaking audiences. I’d like to see it, as the Russians do make some very good movies, such as Burnt by the Sun and many others.
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/02/26/20220226p2g00m0in033000p/9.jpg?1
Note the caption on the map (from 2/25/22).Replies: @HA, @Matra, @YetAnotherAnon, @Mr. Anon, @Hypnotoad666, @Anonymous, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
There’s a difference between attacks and an “invasion.” Yes, Russia attacked along its borders and Belarus’s borders with the Ukraine and from the Black Sea. Attacking in that manner would commonly be done for purposes other than a “full scale invasion,” such as to divert the Ukrainian resources and spread them to make the actual “limited scale invasion” of the Russian speaking Eastern provinces of the Ukraine more successful and to bring it to conclusion more quickly.
A “full scale invasion” would be accompanied with some plan for an occupation of the entire nation being invaded. A “limited scale invasion” would consist of grabbing some land but not the whole and claiming it for the invading nation.
Also worth reading are almost all of the books of Jeff Shaara, the author’s son. Don’t hold the ponderous movie made of his Killer Angels prequel, Gods and Generals, against Shaara. Shaara did a two volume series on the American Revolution, a book about the Mexican War, another about WWI, four about WWII, and one about the Korean War. All are excellent. His three books about specific Civil War battles are not as good, IMHO, but maybe my reading tastes changed over the years.