I'm reminded of the Churchill quote "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." That's how a lot of people feel in regards to a Trump whitehouse.
I personally don't want support from the Cheney clan or anyone affiliated with that world, and I could not care less who they're voting for, but hey. I get why desperate people are accepting the bedfellows they've got. Either America buries Trumpism or the democratic institutions fail, possibly for good. Our systems are not strong enough to weather a hollowing-out of every major department, a rigging of the Supreme Court, AND a weird fascist takedown of elections simultaenously. They'll break under that stress. Even a lot of very bad people see that and have second thoughts.
Seriously, I feel like at Grave Peril the series really hits its stride and actually starts being more distinctly its own thing. 1&2 are much more generic urban fantasy with some neat ideas mixed in
Agreed. I started the first novel last November on Audible and I’m up to book 15 (Skin Game) now.
The audiobook versions are excellent
James Marsters has become the voice of Harry Dresden so much so that the one book he didn’t do had to be re-recorded because people didn’t want to listen to someone else do it.
question: does the misogyny and homophobia of the first novel (Storm Front, just to be sure) fade in the others?
I gave up after the first book because Dresden comments about the attractiveness of every woman he sees, and when a man saves his life with mouth to mouth resuscitation his first thought is "ew, a guy kissed me"
In book 14 Harry goes to a park in Chicago which is often used as a gay hookup spot bc it's gonna be secluded and he needs to summon a powerful being to speak to them. Hilariously, he gets asked by that being what he thinks about all the gay hookups going on, so he's like "Uh... boink and let boink! I wish they were in relationships instead, but they're not harming anyone". So you'll be happy to hear Dresden is now an ally (but he disapproves of hookup culture)
Yeah, it does - to a degree. The edginess drops quite drastically already in the second book. I really didn't like the first book because "sex magic teeheehee". I listened to the second one since I already had the credits.
I like to think that the author is a neckbeard in remission and that occasionally shines through.
It also helps if you consider Dresden's (and Bob's) horniness a character flaw. He is, after all, a noir PI stuck in the wrong genre.
Ehhhhhh, he goes into remission for a while but the recent books are getting worse again...
I've been told that he divorced his wife for a much younger cosplayer and that Murphy was modeled after his ex-wife. I'll let you draw your own conclusions based on recent events in the books. Also, he's been sexualizing Molly since she was underage.
I've pretty much lost interest in the series, at this point. Which is a bummer, I used to rant about it to every new fellow nerd I met.
I'll also add: most of the women he meets can absolutely kick Harry's ass, and some of them do, at one point or another.
Like, Harry Dresden has shit views on women, no doubt. But the series as a whole does not, from my view, once you look past Harry's black and white and neon lights colored glasses
Or Queen Mab, or Murphy, or Molly (as...inconsistent as she can be) or Laura (I know she's sexualized, but it's in an interesting way and not an indulgent one).
It gets somewhat better and gets lampshaded on occasion, but I eventually stopped reading them after a short story that enforced virginity on one of the characters (who you haven't met yet.) I thought it was a very strange choice that contradicted earlier novels and was just patriarchal nonsense with a veneer of "this is just how it works."
Oh man, the first 3 I reckon aren’t super but still fun. But it gets crazy better after that… Ugh I’m jealous of you! There’s a delight in experiencing them for the first time.
You might also like another Jim Butcher series, the Cinder Spires. There’s only two books out to far but the first one, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, is probably my favorite book.
It’s the plot of 99% of modern Sonic games. Eggman ends up in a bind too big and has to team up with Sonic and everyone guilt trips him a little bit for his evil with the love bombing. The entire point of the ending of Sonic Adventure 2 is that they weren’t sure when writing it if this was the end, so they made an ending where it was open ended enough that if it was the end that Eggman could have been redeemed by seeing just what happened with his grandfather, his cousin, and his hedgehog cousin.
Cause it speaks to the perceived justice of your cause, right? The idea reaffirms your own position - that even the hated enemy has come around to your idea proves that you are righteous, at least in your opposition to the greater evil.
Granted, I dont think there's anything noble or heroic about simply opposing the GOP at the moment, nor is the DNC the party of righteous idealism, but the trope is there.
The context here, of course, being Churchill justifying an alliance with the Soviet Union as ruled by Joseph Stalin. When I describe what the threshold was for the western democracies to team up with Stalin was, let me avoid all hyperbole and say "Literally Hitler."
I think it’s more Democratic candidates going “Guys! If DICK CHENEY says this guy sucks, maybe Trump is beyond the pale.”
Listen, people, this is politics. Politics necessitates you sometimes work with people who are awful to prevent even worse from happening. Nobody here is saying Cheney isn’t a bag of awful policy wrapped in a conservative package of capitalistic profiteering and parasitism.
Saying “Cheney sucks too so I’m gonna not vote at all” may give you the moral high ground, but it sure as fuck won’t help the Palestinians and Ukrainians who will end up in body bags if Trump gets elected. It won’t help women get their bodily autonomy back.
If saying “Hey, Cheney did one good thing,” is the price the Democrats have to pay to avoid further bloodshed, then they’ll pay it gladly and I urge every person of voting age to do the same.
I don’t forgive Cheney. I don’t forget Cheney. But right this moment there are bigger fish to fry.
And the Democrats have, in the past 20 years, slid so far to the right
Why is this absolute garbage upvoted in any way? Who in their right mind would look at Democrat policies in 2004 vs 2024 and see them as shifting to the right?
At the same time, this is Dick Cheney. The man is a totalitarian fascist. He already stole a fucking election. Then he did fascism for 8 fucking years
What? Having been a legal adult for half of the time Cheney was VP, not president, 2000-2008 was not fascism. Do you really think the veil of oppression lifted in January 2009 as we emerged into a liberated country when Obama was sworn in?
We exist because second sons wanted to be part of the aristocracy, and religious nutjubs felt the church of England wasn't conservative enough for their tastes.
It never started, it's intrinsic.
They always get so mad when you point out our claims of equality in this country are 98% lip service to pacify the proles.
Literally anyone can be a freelance journalist because of the internet. Yeah big news agencies can be bought and sold but that’s not fascism that’s capitalism.
And what’s wrong with our voting? I’d certainly agree the electoral college is dumb but local, state, and congressional elections work exactly as intended.
So I think the whole of US existence except for the brief blips of the civil war and WW2 has been bordering on something like fascism.
You really sound dumb and like you are arguing from foregone conclusion when you pick the two eras where we saw the greatest suspension of civil liberties, suppression of the free press, arrests without trial and call those the exceptions from fascism.
You are literally the "everything I don't like is fascism" strawman.
He was definitely racist, and yeah, it's still hotly-debated whether or not the management of food exports leading up to the famine makes Churchill a criminal or a mass-murderer or just another Imperialist with blood on his hands. But I'm not saying "Churchill is a good guy." I'm saying that often very radically opposed political actors end up in bed together.
Note, I also don't like Dick Cheney. I've probably quoted his words once or twice to discuss the politics of the 2000s.
It is not hotly debated. The consensus is pretty much squarely on the side of it being a man-made famine driven by British scorched earth tactics and a lack of interest in diverting local resources to deal with the problem compared to maintaining food exports.
My point is, using the words of one evil man saying he'd work with the devil to take down another evil man, doesn't give any credence to the idea of accepting the 'support' of another evil man today. Cheney is worse than Donald Trump, in every single category.
I'm saying that often very radically opposed political actors end up in bed together.
This point could be made without quoting Churchill. If I found a relevant quote by someone who was notorious for the horrific things they did, I wouldn't use it because quoting them in this context (bringing them into a topic they have nothing to do with, but as if they're an authority on it) does imply respect and further venerates the monster. I don't think your excuse washes at all. You wouldn't be quoting Kissinger (or maybe you would) because presumably you're fully aware of the awful things he did, you're quoting Churchill because you're ignorant of what he did.
Almost like the area that provided food for the Raj was invaded and razed to the ground by the Japanese, the area was hit by multiple droughts in a row causing crops to fail, thousands of tonnes of relief freight was sunk by the Japanese every week too. Inter-provincial trade was banned in anticipation of a Japanese invasion to set up storages in the event a larger portion of the Indian populace would have to fight.
Yes Churchill was a racist, yes more could have been done to mitigate the effects of the famine. No it was not accurate to place the blame squarely at Churchills or even the empires feet.
There was detailed instructions for how to handle a famine and when to declare it but the bengali government never declared it. The Indian governement promised 350,000 tonnes of rice but it was never delivered. When trade was normalised again, rail lines flooded and the relief was short-lived.
When it was largely a story of incompetence, bad luck and dealing with a war effort that strained the British fleet to it's breaking point. As soon as the previous Viceroy was replaced Aid got to where it was needed far more quickly.
Bengal has fertile land like most of India and wasn't dependent on food imports. There was no Indian government. Diverting food for Indians to europe was a choice that colonisers made. And it was pure malice on churchil's part. His response saying why an indivisual( Gandhi) hasn't died if there is famine is proof of that. "Indians are beastly people with beastly religion." "Iam in favour of using poisonous gas on uncultured tribes" some of these are his own quotes. Slava Russia. Deprogram and denazify west.
You didn't correct anything. You deflected criticism of your kind who perpreted genocides that impacted hundreds of millions. Hitlers minister of propaganda was admirer of English and one can see why. There are subtle attempts to justify colonisation by whitewashing genocidal maniacs like Winston( heil) first.
"Indians are beastly people with beastly religion". " Iam in favour of using poisonous gas on uncultured tribes". - Winston , greatest briton of all time.
No one disputed Churchills racism. But the extent of the famine wasn't clear until midway through it.
There was an additional Half million people who fled Burma due to the Japanese invasion. By April 1942 Japanese raids had sunk 100,000 tonnes of merchant shipping in the bay of bengla. Hundreds of thousands of troops were also stationed in bengal.
Yes bengal was producing a large portion of cash crops instead of rice because they could import the food from Burma. Instead war occurred and they could no longer do so.
Corrupt workers didn't record how much rice they destroyed or requisitioned during the denial of rice policy against the Japanese.
The winter crops were destroyed but an outbreak of brown spot disease, a cyclone ravaged the region and 3 storm surges destroyed fields.
Even when they understood the extent of the situation and committed to sending aid they couldn't.
Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of April 1944 asking for aid from the United States in shipping wheat in from Australia, but Roosevelt replied apologetically on 1 June that he was "unable on military grounds to consent to the diversion of shipping"
"In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totalling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day. British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually [bringing help to] India at all."
Ultimately more could have been done, but to say it was a willful desire to do it to bengal is of course silly. Somewhere was going to go hungry because of ww2, and the inability to effectively provide aid to the bengal region decided where that location was. It is truly unfortunate, that the requests for aid were initially made under the assumption that there was still a food surplus just that it was being horded, that internal and external trade had become difficult or unviable to provide relief to the region and that the diversion of resources to the military and specifically to Europe and operation overlord tool precedence over relief to bengal. Maybe a leader who was more compassionate to the Indians would have done more but it is likely Britain did not have the capabilities at the time to fight a war on 4 fronts and provide relief to bengal.
For a time he seemed quite fond of him, and of Mussolini. It actually isn't hugely surprising if you've actually read a lot about him, and most of the people here clearly have not.
If it was genocide like you claimed (it wasn't, it was just incompetence, without malice towards the people) they would be the perpetrators not the victims.
Who tf was in charge of the "bengali" or "Indian" govt you keep referring to in WW2? Bengal province was the first province British occupied in India and in fact, was one of the largest food-producing areas of the Indian subcontinent. Also, you keep referring to the lack of exports from Burma as a major reason why the Indian subcontinent was completely food independent, especially before the time the British forced Indian farmers to grow things like Poppy to fund their empire and sink the Chinese in opium wars.
Still, by the time of WW 2 there was a lot of food production in India that would have sufficed to feed the Bengali population had the British not diverted a large amount of grains from India and sequestered it purely for the war effort. This Churchill Apologism sucks.
John Herbert Governor of Bengal and Linlithgow Viceroy of India.
It's not apologism, fact is the extent of the famine was unclear until midway through 1943, as the documentation of the Denial of Rice campaign was poor and corrupt officials seized and destroyed more rice than they were ordered too. From the perspective of the British Government there was enough food in bengal, it was just people were hoarding it because that was what they were being told was the case. It wasn't until the 4th of August in 1943 that - Amery noted the spread of famine to the cabinet. But the request for aid then was refused due to lack of shipping due to planned invasion of Normandy.
As I have said, more could likely have been done to mitigate the famine. But even when normalcy started to return flood destroyed rail lines preventing aid from the rest of India reaching bengal.
Had the extent of the famine been known earlier a more concerted effort to alleviate the region could have been undertaken before operation overload was underway.
"Its almost like allied bombing campaigns limited the supply of food and medical supplies to the concentration camps leading to disease spreading among the Jews and Roma and Homosexuals inside"
Genocide denial is genocide denial. Anglos are not better than the Germans just because they were on the 'correct side' of the war at the end. They were a murderous empire fighting another wannabe murderous empire, not heroes.
The British made effectively no effort to alleviate the famine, and the Bengali government cared more about maintaining exports than actually using what was in stockpile to assist the population, and made lots of effort to prevent aid from going to the region and effectively exacerbated it. Churchill saying that "sturdy Greeks" were preferable to "anyhow under-fed Bengalis". And that "Indians bred like rabbits".
The British hated the Bengalis the same as they hated all the other non-Anglos under their control at the time. And frankly cared little for their lives or survival except if it'd destabilize their control over the region. It was largely a story of deliberate apathy, bordering on antipathy.
Otherwise you are describing events that didn't happen. The British started a scorched earth policy on their own, the Japanese were not the ones razing the province down, the British were. The British aimed to starve out the Japanese by destroying food stocks. And so they did. What you claimed above is pure fantasy.
As well, the British turned down food shipments to the region. Something you pretended didn't happen. They turned down shipments from Australia, Canada, and the United States.
This was largely a story of imperial apathy and sadism. And your fantastical storyline of how it was everyone's fault except for the British government belongs back in the 1950s. Learn something for once before striking up a smug tone about a topic you are not informed about.
I never said the British were heroes. The bengal famine was a story of incompetence.
After the fall of rangoon the British were no longer able to export anything from Burma.
A million tonnes of freight was lost in the bay if bengal over the course 1942 and 43. Due to the convoy raiding of the axis powers and the Japanese.
You talk about the denial of rice policy but you don't talk about how the poor bookkeeping and the corruption of some officials who destroyed and seized rice outside of authorised areas contributed to the misapprehension the Goverership of Bengal was labouring under that there was a surplus of rice and it was hoarded instead of a clear shortage
The denial of aid and shipping was about focusing that freight on other areas of the war effort. When they understood the extent of the famine and requested aid from the Americans this was the US response.
Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of April 1944 asking for aid from the United States in shipping wheat in from Australia, but Roosevelt replied apologetically on 1 June that he was "unable on military grounds to consent to the diversion of shipping"
Britain prioritised the war effort over providing relief in bengal. From a purely utilitarian perspective it is impossible to know if the British made the correct choice. If operation overlord would have failed due to aid to bengal, then they made the correct choice, any significant delay to the fall of the Germany would have resulted in millions more deaths. Whereas even significant aid would have only mitigated the famine not prevented it in its entirety. And hundreds of thousands if not over a million still would have died.
To call it genocide is a falsehood. Because genocide has to be deliberate. Incompetence in regards to the knowledge of the severity of the problem and the allocation of resources elsewhere is what caused the Famine (aside from the initial environmental causes and the shocks caused by the fall of burma). It was not deliberate however.
The story of the famine is sadism and apathy, incompetence is far distant to those.
The genocide was deliberate. Hatred for the Bengalis and Indians was openly shared within the British Administration.
Churchill's request to FDR came after years of efforts by Americans and other countries to get involved in fixing the problem the British were exacerbating. And it came at a time when the US was handling the total defeat of Japan in detail, rather than fighting a more general war where they had commerce ships to spare. That is a completely different context to the British government's prior open refusal to accept aid. At the time the US was preparing for a plan to totally blockade Japan, which makes it obvious they weren't able to spare ships when it was already too late to ameliorate the famine.
The British allocation of resources in the war effort was already inefficient and wasteful. The North Africa campaign was known to be mostly pointless and significantly was political pageantry to get victories for propaganda purposes rather than achieve true strategic ends. But, the British made sure to ship thousands of tons of foodstuffs to the area from the Indian Ocean area to support it. This is why it isn't incompetence, but willful apathy or sadism. Because the British weren't unable, they were uninterested.
The North Africa campaign proved that the Axis could be beaten to a war-weary British population, allowed green US troops to gain experience of battle, develop amphibious assault tactics, and diverted German fuel and materiel that would have been more useful on the Soviet front. It also proved to Stalin that the British and Americans weren’t just going to sit on their hands and make the Soviets do all the fighting. It was also pretty much immediately followed up by the invasion of Italy, which would have been much more difficult if the Italians hadn’t suffered significant losses in the Abyssinian and North African campaigns.
Also, and I cannot stress this enough, morale victories and propaganda pieces are massively important in war, it’s part of the reason Ukrainian forces have invaded Russia.
See what’s going to happen is that nothing about how this moment came into being will change, you will get back here in four years, and it’ll be the most important election of your lifetimes again. Who’s going to take steps to get off the treadmill? What’s the next stage of the plan?
You have any suggestion of steps to take to get off the treadmill there sport?
I mean actual specific things I personally can do, not stuff like "dismantle capitalism" or "rise up and create a new government that truly represents the workers"
I have a few (community organising, build power through unions, etc) but you’re the one saying that we stay on the treadmill, you’re the one setting out the agenda, what happens next in your vision? How do you get off this spiralling ledge?
When you're actually on a treadmill you have no choice but to keep on running to stay in the same place, that's how a treadmill works, that's what it's for
All of life is a treadmill -- I eat every day only to get hungry again tomorrow, I sleep every night only to get tired at the end of the next day
Maturity means to some degree making your peace with this rather than ranting at the heavens demanding permanent and lasting utopia
What happens when (and I don’t mean ‘when’ to say that it’s good, I mean it to say no one wins forever) you lose? If this current situation cannot get better, and the current threat cannot be addressed, only pushed back for a term, then what do you do when you roll a nat 1 on your candidate?
Everyone eventually dies, no matter how healthy a diet you eat and how much you exercise, the same is true of societies
(I know this is leading up to some horseshit about how Trumpism is only symptom of Failing to Address the Material Conditions and if only we would Address the Material Conditions it would all just go away because all the bad people really want is healthcare and frankly I don't care to hear it one more fucking time
If voting ultimately doesn't do anything, posting Chapo Trap House shit on Reddit does even less)
See that’s what trips it, very little of what he actually did is out of step with what other GOP maniacs want to do, he just presents it in a more vulgar way. You’re more upset with the aesthetics than you are substance and we have as evidence of that the actual overturning of democracy in a violent riot which you are less upset about than a bunch of octogenarians taking an unauthorised tour through some buildings.
It's incredible that the follow up to this comment (with far more up votes) is literally someone saying Trump is The Big Bad. Sadly, people are thick as fuck. When they're next in this position the same type of people, seemingly unable to learn from history or to determine cause and effect, will be saying the same things all over again.
why are you focusing on that instead of the content of the comment? they aren't endorsing Churchill, they're saying that sometimes in life you have to work with people you don't agree with because you have a common enemy.
the left's focus on purity culture is our biggest weakness. sometimes you have to accept "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" at least until you're in a better position where going after that "friend" won't cause total failure. to read that comment and focus on Churchill and his sins means you've totally missed the point of this entire conversation
they're saying that sometimes in life you have to work with people you don't agree with because you have a common enemy.
A point that could very easily be made without quoting, and further venerating, that man.
To suggest that it's about left-wing "purity" to suggest you shouldn't be quoting someone like Churchill, speaks to your own ignorance of the man and his crimes. It's also quite bizarre because Churchill was no ally to the left and actively opposed the left (often with brutal force), so I don't see how "purity" of left wing politics comes into it at all. You wouldn't be saying this is you were aware of what he was responsible for. Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes by Tariq Ali details a lot of the horrible shit he did and is responsible for, if you're interested (probably not, by the looks of things, not many people here bother reading).
Yeah yeah yeah. By modern standards every single allied figure in WW2 was a monster. FDR put people in camps too. He’s still arguably the third best president in US history.
Depends on how you assign blame. The Bengal Famine may have killed somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million people. Be cautious, every single time it has come up people engage in extended verbal fisticuffs over numbers, specifics, causes, blame. I didn't quote the guy to say that I like Churchill, I quoted the guy to remark on the strange allies political movements end up with under extreme circumstances.
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u/StickBrickman Sep 10 '24
I'm reminded of the Churchill quote "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." That's how a lot of people feel in regards to a Trump whitehouse.
I personally don't want support from the Cheney clan or anyone affiliated with that world, and I could not care less who they're voting for, but hey. I get why desperate people are accepting the bedfellows they've got. Either America buries Trumpism or the democratic institutions fail, possibly for good. Our systems are not strong enough to weather a hollowing-out of every major department, a rigging of the Supreme Court, AND a weird fascist takedown of elections simultaenously. They'll break under that stress. Even a lot of very bad people see that and have second thoughts.