Anomander

Also, on the subject of this song being “breakout/viral” - how hard is it to manipulate streaming numbers?

It's seemed like the numbers there are 'semi-'manipulated in the way that Kpop can be - hugely inflated by deliberate rewatching and multi-platform streaming, but by individuals who genuinely want the song to do well, rather than bots or purchased fake stats.

It's really seemed like 'the right' sees Oliver Anthony as "their guy" and rallied behind him and his song in order to push it up the charts as an imagined way of 'owning the libs' - and I think OA's industry backing worked hard to seed that narrative among those circles in order to elicit that sort of boosterism from them.

The person you're responding to is basically making the, "steal a loaf of bread to feed your family" argument. It's complicated by the fact that loaf of bread was already reserved for saving others,

That's a spurious argument here, though. This is like not buying groceries for two months, having the cash to buy groceries, then stealing a loaf of bread to feed the family.

These people shouldn't be there, they're on evacuation order, and they have safe routes to leave. Not one of their lives is in danger that they haven't chosen. But they did choose - to put their property ahead of their own lives, and in stealing fire equipment they're putting their own property ahead of the lives of fire response teams and ahead of all the other properties in the same area. They're willing to have the whole neighborhood burn around them, to cut off safe evacuation routes, all to try and save their own home.

but it's stupid to act like they're a deranged person without a point.

They're engaging in sophistry and misrepresenting the situation to try and make hindering firefighting efforts into something personally justifiable. It isn't.

Could kind of see how someone facing down an impending roaring wildfire, then stealing from the same people they want help from, might be counterproductive. The people telling them not to steal fire equipment are there. They're the ones fighting the fire.

No private resident needs that equipment "to save their own life". They're on evacuation order, there are safe routes out, they should not be there, and they chose to stay in order to protect their property. The bridge that sprinklers are getting stolen from, for instance, is protected so there will be a safe passage out of the area consistently even if the fire shifts in that direction.

This is about wealth - not health. Stealing that equipment is choosing to fuck over the entire region and everyone else who needs fire protection, just to better preserve their own home, is selfish and stupid.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on 'rival' platforms.

I read all of it. I'm not going to criticize you for not reading before jumping to conclusions and then do the same.

Highest irony to accuse me of being tedious and making stuff up for going into detail addressing what your skimming missed, but I certainly hope you're not going to lead with that particularly charged allegation and not follow it up.

Because I think many people would not take the time.

What I was saying is that you didn't take the time either. Just opening the comic book and looking at five panels, looking at the cover notes for a kids book, or dismissing liner notes and goodreads reviews of alt-right nonsense is not "taking the time" and it's disingenuous to the point of open dishonesty to pretend that you did.

Wanting to backpedal from "taking the time" like you did real due diligence to "they only complained about images so I only skimmed the pictures" is absolutely farcical when you're trying to come for me as if expecting you to do more than the absolute barest minimum while you'd also playact at doing the homework and checking the sources.

But if you'd confined your remarks to "yeah those images bad" I wouldn't have bothered to say anything.

Instead you spent four paragraphs waxing poetic about things you misunderstood from your skimming and telling personal anecdotes about how you've always judged people who had nasty racist Asterix cartoons in their houses. The whiplash here between pretending to be some noble neutral facts-centric person who cares about checking the sources and reviewing the material and then also doing longjump to wild conclusions about racial overtones and narrative structure and even the people who owned that shit when you were a kid is ridiculous.

So to be clear, it's not "deflecting" to criticize you for presenting comprehensive criticism of the work while not engaging with the material substantively enough to support that level of analysis and critique.

But it is "deflecting" to dodge the criticism made, as if it's out of line to bring up at all, move into attacks on me, and then try to point our conversation at a pair of cherry-picked images with suggestive hinting leading to a conclusion.

It's probably worth clarifying for you, though, that it's only fairly recently that western society and especially continental romance societies have "come to terms" with the fact that most of the Roman empire was made up of people who are not "white" in modern contemporary understandings. That's not some wild racist conspiracy you're noticing - that's the prevalent (mis)understanding of common Roman appearances from its era.

who is that? all I am aware of is a single anonymous request. Do you have more info?

So you really did just see one news story, look up a comic book and skim like five frames, and then show up here with a book report on racism to pretend you did the work? Jesus fuck. Here is an article from two years ago covering the topic, here is an article from three years, mounting a bit of a weird-angle defense of them. Eleven years ago, there was this.

The debate around the Asterix stuff dating to the 70's and 80's has been going on for quite a while, possibly even predating Blyton's Gollywogs - because it's so clearly unacceptable to the modern eye.

Who is the bad guys? I said I thought it should be removed from the children’s section but available to adults. So you think the “free speech” people are “the bad guys”?

Are you aware that the story you are criticizing, and yet did not read any of, has "good guys" and "bad guys" in it? The conflict between them is a fundamental part of the story.

What you did here is like you read Maus and decided it's pro-fascist because it has Nazi mice in it who do Nazi things.

Also, you absolutely did lead with that charged allegation and then absolutely did not follow it up with anything of substance. It really does kind of come across like you didn't read my remarks any more than you read the source texts, and instead did the same here as you did with the comic book - simply skimmed looking for snippets you felt safe arguing with or criticizing.

I think OP's response to skimming a single Asterix comic is almost illustrative of how people 'on the other side' can so easily get their shit knotted up and wind up wanting to ban any and all books with rainbows in them or that acknowledge LBGT people exist - so I think that both those takes showing up in one place is a spot of fantastic irony.

I don’t care to actually read this so I don’t know what the plot is about.

Yeh. Right there. That's the hallmark quote.

So early and up front, there are definitely huge problems with how Underzo illustrated black people. I think there's very good arguments to be made for removing the comics including some of the more offensive racial caricatures from common circulation. However, OP is working a little too hard to be a little too outraged here.

A lot of this isn't defense so much as context and the importance of it when engaging in critique from a position of good faith.

Every single group portrayed in the comics is caricatured. In the modern era, we have sensibilities that mean caricatures of minorities, and black people especially, are significantly more frowned upon than similar caricatures of 'pale' folks. I won't dive into the 'why' around minstrel shows and shit, but it's absolutely necessary to understand that is a very recent sensibility. That sort of portrayal could only come from deliberate prejudice today - but that is not the case in even the recent era these were made.

OP may have skimmed past, or even not have a cultural context to recognize that, the comics are also making fun of 'gaulish' and 'roman' features in similar fashion, or that the series did so towards all the other groups that the comics encountered. Nobody appeared on page without getting a few potshots sent their way.

Yes, in that specific comic the black characters played a very small part and were in a servile role - they were slaves. As actual romans had slaves and were callous and cruel towards them, so too the Romans in the comics. They are the villains, in case that was missed while skimming. The vast majority of the series takes place in Northern France during the roman occupation, so non-white folks are a pretty decided minority in that part of the world and in that era - and the cited scene takes place in some Roman vacation town IIRC, where again, nonwhite folks are very minority and very likely to be property.

While it doesn't make the exact depictions OK, I think OP has definitely missed the fact that the practice of slavery and the power dynamics are being criticized there and that the Romans' treatment of their subjects is not glorified - while OP is responding as if the Romans had been the good guys and we're all supposed to be supportive and indoctrinated by how they treated the black folks in the comics. The gag about beating up masseuses is, for example, setting up the villains as villainous, and is not supposed to be a straightforward statement that the reader agrees with.

It doesn't take that much work to pick that up.

So that OP is both refusing to read the books and is effectively skimming looking for outrage-bait, and then also going off on the existence of a series and a bunch of narrative they had to invent, while recognizing this from their childhood and pretending that they saw it in people's houses and hated them for it, while it's some sort of alt-right racist indoctrination leaflet...

If you're going to pretend you're better than the people calling for kids books to be banned "because they 'ask people to be decent'" then actually be better. Don't write essays supporting and decrying various books if you're unwilling to put the bare modicum of effort into understanding the criticisms and the context behind them. If you don't know - you don't know. You don't need to gild the lily with fiction and personal invective. You certainly should be above jumping to that sort of wild personal judgement, and even prejudice, based on something you have near-zero understanding of.

Even the very well-educated and and 'expert' people who are calling for some Asterix comics to be removed from circulation / libraries are doing so because the caricatures are no longer appropriate to modern sensibilities. No one with any familiarity with them, even who wants those books removed from circulation, is subscribing to any small fraction of what OP has, effectively, made up about them based on looking at maybe 20 panels from a ~50 page book.

The caricatures are super racist.

The actual content is not some wild racist indoctrination material, OP somehow wound up rooting for the bad guys while skimming, and seems to think that everyone else would get brought along similar.

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it's bulletproof.

Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.

Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

How is that supposed to work, though?

Like, say I'm wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don't say shit. Big Gargamel doesn't say shit. How would the "undeclared funding" bar know?