Yes, it's a Mel Gibson movie, and he's a deranged, racist piece of shit. But, as South Park put it, the sonofabitch knows story structure, and the ending of Apocalypto really is inspired. One of those rare cinematic moments that takes you entirely out of yourself. For me, anyway.

...Palestinians don't think there should be a Jewish presence in the Holy Land, either.

That's an important question. The answer is, it *doesn't* necessarily require displacing anyone; that's why I support two states for two peoples. Unfortunately, it's undeniably true that those Israelis who feel entitled to all the land have grown more powerful, but then, the vast majority of...

Oddly reassuring 😜

Right. But also: I'm sure *you* could fight off an XL Bully, but if you owned one, and it suddenly went for a three-year-old kid, would you be able to move fast enough to stop it doing real damage? And if you could, how certain are you? So many variables.

Breed-specific bans really *aren't* the civil rights issue of our time. But people who can readily grasp how disastrous it is for the U.S. to be flooded with firearms suddenly go mushy, where dangerous dogs are concerned. "There are no bad dogs" is little comfort to parents of a dead toddler.

(5/5)

...an actual, growing body count attached to this problem. I'm not saying they all need to be put down, or anything, and I'm sure some of them really are lovely family dogs. But the numbers don't lie, and it's more than reasonable not to want XL Bully ownership to proliferate.

(4/5)

...just won't hear it. In fact, in a lot of online dog spaces, the very suggestion some breeds might be inherently dangerous, or even more dangerous than average, is treated as akin to racism. I'd be inclined to write that off as mere sentimentality, or woolly thinking, if there weren't...

(3/5)

But let's put it this way: you *can* kill someone with a rolling pin, but that doesn't mean rolling pins are just as dangerous as knives, because knives have been crafted in ways that make them efficient killing tools. The same obviously applies to certain dog breeds, but certain people...

(2/5)

For the sake of completeness, here's the rest of "As I Please" for May 19th, 1944, followed by annotations for the whole column, from Peter Davison's Complete Works of George Orwell. It's fascinating, to compare antisemitic invective, then and now. Different, but the same.

(3/3)

He was responding to a pamphlet written by Vera Brittain, a leading pacifist in the interwar years, but apparently keen to defeat the Axis, once the war had started. Here's her response to his piece, followed by his response to her response. Just like Bluesky, only slower!

(2/3)

The only time in Russian history when the KGB, in its various incarnations dating back to the 16th-century oprichnina, faced a stronger force.

I suppose you could argue that depicting a historical figure as steeped in blood as Georgy Zhukov as an aspirational badass was/is ethically questionable. But he's not a *good* guy, in an absolute sense; only relative to the moral black hole that is TDoS's Beria. And, after all, he DID fuck Germany.

(Source for last post: www.screentimecentral.com/beyond-the-o...)

I've just looked it up, and Isaacs as Zhukov is actually only onscreen for just over *eight* minutes of The Death of Stalin; by comparison, Simon Russell Beale as Beria and Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev get forty-four and forty-six, respectively. So, his dominance of the film truly is very impressive.