Tau Ceti HQ

Imagine a salesman who comes aboard a train. Among the other passengers is a soldier in uniform. The salesman knows a tiny bit about the distant war the soldier has likely fought in – just what he happened to pick up from the news – and he thinks he read somewhere that approximately 15-20 % of the troops involved in that conflict have been diagnosed with severe Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

( The salesman sits down opposite the soldier... )


And that, gentle reader, is the gist of some of the  so-called 'arguments' made by male commenters in the discussion thread of this post. And these are the men who say they don't hate women. With friends like these who needs sadistic misogynists?

Have just watched Inception. Have nothing to add to the accolades showered on the film, except for this teensy weensy detail:

It must be nice to wake up from the nightmare and find that you were a privileged citizen all along. We just didn’t all have that advantage.

Ah, Inception is beautiful, beautiful,  beautiful. The CGI is beautiful. It’s beautifully scripted, beautifully filmed, beautifully cut, beautifully acted, and beautifully scored.

Half the world’s population is female, though. No, that’s actually wrong; make that 51% of the world’s population. So why is it, exactly, that I cannot - and I do mean

can

not

get to see my sex represented on film?

I am led to believe that Christopher Nolan worked on this film for a decade, i.e. ten years – ten years?!

In all that time, it did not occur to him that half of the world’s population is female. Wow.

Oh, I get it; Christopher Nolan is not responsible for the entire history of misogyny. Quite right. That is why all I expected from him was 50/50, and not 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000 females for every male to make up for the last two thousand years of bigotry in storytelling.

What did I get?

I got 12 story-supporting characters, 2 of whom were female. That’s 16,7% of the cast being female. Not quite the 51% that I had been hoping for, Christopher. And to top it all off, one of the females was the femme fatale; the background character that brings nothing but death. The other one was the secretary character, meaning the one that is sexually attractive in a non-threatening way whilst supporting the main character and bringing him his tea.

Oh yeah! And I do know that we are led to believe that the Mal character has the last word, it all being her dream or something. Funny, though, how she figures so little - she's fridged, ffs - and is never shown as anything but the Scary Woman, even though as far as I can make out, she died because the hero fucked up. Not to worry, though: she died in order to give him an interesting storyline, so her sacrifice was not in vain!



PS: Having to disallow comments on this post because the death threats are going to be a little bit much this time around.

Ergh. I know that in the grand scheme of things, this is probably not as bad as it looks. I sure hope not, because I gotta tell you, Fandom, it looks pretty bad. This rant was instigated by this post in ffrantsrants.

( The questionable hotness of child abuse )

When will people realise that free speech also means the freedom to criticise what others have said using their free speech? They're entitled to say what they want, yes, but they are not entitled to not be contradicted; where the hell did people get that idea? What kind of a twisted concept of tolerance is behind such reasoning? Illogical SOBs, I hate your faulty brains. You get to voice your fantasies; I get to voice my disgust with them, cat-fish?

Here, let me spell it out: if you think child abuse is hot, you're my enemy and that's all there is to it. Simple, nay?

They killed Aaron Hall. I just found out yesterday and spent a sleepless night in fury. Have you heard about this? So a man, a father, beloved by his family and friends, had to die horribly because a couple of 'nough-saids apparently failed their potty-training - or whatever it is that went wrong. Something obviously did. And not just with them: there are actually people out there defending their actions! Because the murderers thought Aaron Hall might be gay. Oh, well, that makes it all right, then!

Vesper Holly has described the case on wordspress here.

We've seen similar unbelievable atrocities before. The Abu Ghraib photos of the guards' sexual assaults on helpless prisoners - suspects who were not even convicted of any crime - and the real smack on the head was that the perpetrators themselves proudly provided the documentation! That always reminds me of cheering lynch mobs. And of the unspeakable genocides we know are always taking place somewhere on this godforsaken globe.

And now the murder of Aaron Hall. These... people? - tortured a man to death over the course of so many hours I cannot possibly bear to think about it. If they had done that to an insect, I would say they were certifiable. If they'd done it to a dog, I'd never let them out of the asylum. They did it to a human being. What kind of a creature beats another human being to death - someone who never hurt them or anyone - and then celebrates? What they did to an innocent man would not have been justifiable even if they'd done it to Hitler. Because it says so much more about the person doing the torturing than about the person being tortured. Sane people just aren't capable of that.

Honestly, I was hoping that this particular sort of thing didn't happen anymore. I know there is always hate crime in this world, but I really didn't expect it to be something any so-called "normal" people would half-way condone! Not now. In 2007.

I really didn't expect people making comments like: "I would have beat him up but not killed him. Even though it would be nice to kill him, it would be wrong." WOOOT??? Listen here, fuckwad: What other people do in their personal lives is None. of your. business. If they're not hurting anyone, you had better not be hurting them. Shit-for-brains, bigoted pile of worthless dung.

And I cannot begin to describe how appalled I am that it's even slightly possible that a so-called "gay panic" defense might get these murderers a shorter sentence.

I wonder what would happen if I - accidentally - happened to bludgeon all these UNBELIEVABLE FUCKNECKS and then - just as accidentally, of course - happened to drop them in the deep fat frier, shouting "GANGING UP ON SOMEONE WHO CAN'T DEFEND THEMSELVES DOES NOT ADD INCHES TO YOUR PRICK" - and then pleaded "homophobe panic"? I simply cannot control myself when I meet homophobes, Your Honour. I go into a panic. Yeah well, the state of panic lasts for days while I slowly but surely take their lives...

The thing is, I could never do that. Not that they don't deserve it. But unlike these filthy bigoted scumfucks, I am incapable of harming someone, unless I truly fear for my own life or the life of someone else. I thought that was the natural way to be. But that's just me. And my kind.

It is times like these I wish stupidity was painful. That would be true justice. Those people would have not even lived to kill Aaron Hall. They would have died in excruciating spasms. Instead, they are alive, and the world has just one more fatherless girl.

God - you sure have forsaken me and my kind. Guess what? Right back atya.