#and uses the invasion of iraq too?? wtf??

[ohwarnette]

it’s really wild seeing some goodreads users still hyping up fourth wing and ry. if you’re choosing to willingly consume and promote that media after being made aware and use the “let people read what they want” and the “don’t bring politics into goodreads” argument, you honestly disgust me.

[christmasintheloonybin]

I've been thinking a lot lately about Assad and the Syrian Civil War and how clearly narratives are pushed. obviously yeah his government killed civilians and protesters or whatever, but it's only going to be politically motivated when people speak up about it and say "he needs to step down!" not only this but, there has got to be a word or some name for this, when a thing can be seen as exotic or foreign, when people talk about it gross oversimplifications are totally accepted. I mean it's not as if Assad was out there with a gun shooting at protesters but western people will say "HE killed civilians." when a black guy gets shot by a cop in the United States no one says "wtf why would Joe Biden do this?" they can make it abstract say there is racism sort of like as like a spirit in America but we can fight against it and we have to defund the police and do this and that. it's very complex. when something bad happens overseas it's "omg why would Assad do this? why would Putin do this?" (I know it is sort of a weak comparison between police brutality and war crimes but consider all of the war crimes the United States has committed, never being blamed on the president, almost always covered up and at best the individual soldiers who commit these crimes are sent to prison or whatever, its never treated as a political or social problem). this also got me thinking historically about how oversimplified so many of these things are. "Hitler killed a million billion!" "Mao killed two hundred gazillion!" they literally didn't, they did things which caused the deaths of people but they personally did not kill anyone. and so why is it that when Syria is involved in a civil war in which a lot of people are killed it is immediately Assad's fault but when America goes to war, for example in Iraq where the official number leftists always use is a million, a million people died because of the united States intervening, but how many millions have died indirectly because of the destabilization which continues today? if other parties were to play the same game as the United States they could easily say 10 million people died because of the US invasion of Iraq. but of course no one says this or if they do its seen as silly because the US had good intentions, Assad does too. Putin has good intentions, Mao and Hitler in their minds had good intentions. this is a ridiculous argument.

[script-a-world]

Got a question. I’ve been working on a story for many years now. I’ve recently realized that my world shares some similar world elements to an already existing and popular franchise (unintentional, I only just started watching it). This is okay, right? I still want to write it because I know it is different, but I’m concerned with people saying I’m ripping them off, not to mention issues getting published.

Constablewrites: What about your story is different to the other one? Being similar to a popular property can actually be a vital selling point (what the publishing industry refers to as a comp title). “Hunger Games but it’s in space” is a perfectly valid elevator pitch, and when you have more room to expand you can get further into the details that make it different. “Hunger Games but… well, mine is a graphic novel?” is gonna be a harder sell. So if you don’t currently have that clear departure from that other story, work on developing it.

Tex: To borrow from Constable’s example, the Hunger Games weren’t made in a vacuum, either (Wikipedia):

Collins has said that the inspiration for The Hunger Games came from channel surfing on television. On one channel she observed people competing on a reality show and on another she saw footage of the invasion of Iraq. The two "began to blur in this very unsettling way" and the idea for the book was formed.[2] The Greek myth of Theseus served as a major basis for the story, with Collins describing Katniss as a futuristic Theseus, and Roman gladiatorial games provided the framework. The sense of loss that Collins developed through her father's service in the Vietnam War was also an influence on the story, with Katniss having lost her father at age 11, five years before the story begins.[3]

The only authors I’ve seen blatantly saying that their stories are completely original are oblivious to the point of pretentiousness - in a lot of cases, it’s better to source your inspirations, because it allows publishers clear guidelines on your story’s marketability and in which niche to direct their efforts.

Publishing houses, if they’ve got enough experience, can use that crossover of themes and inspirational source material to help you edit your novel and do things like produce summaries and source artists for covers and other marketing material. So long as you know it’s different, you can probably find a way to defend your manuscript as such, and the right ears will hear the tune you’re selling them.

Delta: To continue the above example, The Hunger Games also bears a resemblance to Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, which predates it. Though I’m sure the cultural divide helps explain the lack of overlap, it does demonstrate that it is totally possible to have similar ideas and still be separate. Take the movies White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen as another example. I once described them as the same pitch, developed by two different directors. They are completely different in tone, theme, and many pertinent details, though the premises are functionally identical. Yet both were independent blockbuster movies.

If you’re worried about being influenced by another work, perhaps to your work’s detriment, I would recommend simply not consuming the existing work, but at the same time it’s important to read and watch as a creator yourself, to fine-tune your skill. So don’t be too afraid of consuming similar content; as long as you don’t intentionally plagiarize, I doubt you’d have anything to worry about.

Constablewrites: The “unintentionally duplicated movie” is very much A Thing in Hollywood, where very very similar movies come out within a year or so of each other, meaning the chances of one taking its ideas from the other are pretty slim. Pixar was a bit plagued by it in the early days, with A Bug’s Life/Antz or Finding Nemo/Shark Tale. (Also Monsters Inc/Ice Age, but no one noticed that those are the same plot.) Occasionally I’ll hear from agent/slush reader friends something like “There hasn’t been a carnival movie in ages so why do I have six of them on my desk wtf”. Some synchronicity is just to be expected.

Mirintala: I was in a writing class recently where the instructor talked about reading submissions for an anthology that had been an open call and they had gotten four or five stories with the same premise (I don't remember exactly but it was similar enough, like cannibal werewolves on a train. It happens pretty often. Collective unconscious just gets caught up on something maybe?

[longwindedbore]

To understand North Korea & Nukes

First understand history

North Korea appears to be a hell-hole without redemption. However, a hell-hole that within living memory had hell-fire rain down from the sky. Gratis of the USAF. The US figures we dropped more than 600,000 tons of bombs, including 33 tons of napalm on North Korea.

Four times what we dropped on Japan. A third of what we dropped on all of much Much MUCH larger Europe in WW2. But dropped on Korea Indiscriminately on civilian populations.

The US is powerful & White racist

Needless to say, the North Koreans are scared of our continued racist indifference to killing brown people. After all we gleefully demonstrated our brown people killing sprees in our televised Vietnam napalming and our carpet bombing of Iraq. To start those wars we fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the WMD Intelligence.

Not too mention our assorted invasions of Panama, Grenada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Afghanistan. All fabricated pretexts.

All these military devestations occurred utilizing the most powerful Navy in the history of the World. A Navy without an adversary to challenge it on the high seas.

Since there is no adversary, one may, of course ask some questions:

#1. Beside aggressive imperialistic invasions what purpose does our gigantic Navy serve? Obviously not defending against navies that no longer exist. Nor planning to steam to Europe since Russia is not capable of launching military invasions.

#2. Why are we still expanding our Navy when the Falkland Island War demonstrated the vulnerability of Navies to missles? Naval construction decreased in every other nation in the world after that War.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Which brings me at last to Korea‘s, Iran’s and the late Saddham Hussein’s preoccupation with nuclear weapons. As opposed to far far less expensive but much more devastating weaponry.

Certainly any adversary could smuggle a nuclear weapon or weapons into the US and set them off. No matter how devestating to the country, that attack won’t affect our subs. A nuclear attack will trigger our fleet of 15 subs with multi-head nuclear missles. They will turn Korea or Iran or Russia or China into a nuclear wasteland.

Who would try if failure is guaranteed?

NATO’s Cold War playbook

Korea and Iran or Iraq could use atomic weapons like NATO intended to respond to an overwhelming USSR/Warsaw Pact tank blitz into Germany during the Cold War.

NATO was going to detonate nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere. The Electo-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) would fry the electrical systems of the tanks. The Soviet invasion would grind to a halt. With minimal loss of life.

Similarly, faced with an imminent seaborn invasion by US forces, North Korea can detonate nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere. On our nuclear powered ships, like our carriers, the crews train for that eventuality. The carriers will re-boot. But not their jets. Nor their support ships. So the carriers will have to take on the other crews and being essentially defenseless, will turn back.

At which point a general “WTF” in the States might - it’s slim but - might stop the war.

After all we didn’t go to war over the Lusitania, over the Destroyer incident, over ‘54:40 or fight’. Regan got out of Lebanon after the barracks bombing 200 service personnel deaths without loss of * his * prestige. Like Lenanon, Korea is blessed in having no oil.

Limited conventional options

However, absent nuclear EMP, any conventional attack on our ships will result in one of our “remember the _____” episodes and no internal US effort will stop the devestation.

Lacking nuclear bombs, Iran could spread radioactive dust over the fleet to prevent its launching attacks on civilian targets. Risky as to what US reaction will be triggered when all the crews go blind.

So North Korea would be insane to give up their nuclear weapons. The only way to stop an invasion. You notice that North Korea’s neighbors arent losing sleep about their proximity to North Korean weaponry. They are all far more worried about white racist controlled USA fomenting an excuse to kill brown people. Then the bombs go off.

No oil. On the other hand the US invaded and occupied Vera Cruz, Mexico for half a year in1914 for failure to provide a 21 gun salute.

Why would North Korea trust ���the Great White Father in Washington”?

From the North Korean standpoint it’s insane to think we still aren’t a country of white racist pigs. Largest Invasion fleet in the history of the world couldn’t sail to the aid of (brown) Puerto Rican American citizens?

Thousands of post-hurricane deaths - negligiant homicide - of brown Citizens and non-GOP voters because as the Racist-in-Chief explains, “This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water...”.

No one in the USA says “bullshit!” No Congressional investigation by either Party two years after the event. Or of the *obvious to a six year old * utterly corrupt no-bid award of the re-electrification contract to a three-person firm.

See. A country controlled by white racist pigs.

When White Racists are bypassed

Fortunately for many other islands in the Caribbean, the US Navy “forgot” during Hurricane Maria to inform the Great Orange Pig that there is a Leeward Island squadron. So the Great Orange Pig was unable to * redirect * the squad’s Naval operations.

The Leward Island squadron * surprisingly * had little difficulty traveling across “ocean water” to reach the hurricane devastated islands. Whereupon the Navy supplied drinking water from the ship’s’ desalinization plants and power from the ships’ generators. Medical services were provided. Helicopters flew inland to remote areas; journeying unimpeded by trees across roadways. Unlike the “efforts more directly controlled by the Great Orange Pig.

It’s too disgusting to describe the horror and abandonment of Puerto Rico by White Racist mainland. Suffice that the same naval hospital ship during the Obama administration handled 10x as many Haitians following their earthquake than it did Puerto Rican’s under the present Administration.

North Korea is a hell-hole because of a horrible government that does not care about its people. If you are Puerto Rican, what would be the result of a comparison of the actions of the governments in Pyongyang and Washington toward their respective Citizens?

KAL in The Economist

[thedailyanthill]

I've Never Been A Follower And I'm Not Starting Now

I've always marched to the beat of my own drummer and no matter how off-beat (literally) she is, I'm staying that way. Life in high school was hell-to-the-no fun but whatever. I stay true to myself, my own values and if that means a little rebellion here and there, so be it.

Like this whole kneeling for the National Anthem. I support the football players' right to do this because this is a)still a free country b)if you're going to support the rights of white supremacists to speak but not this you're a hypocrite and c)Kaepernick was right, and is right, about in checked racism in this country. Those up in arms about these protests are just proving him right: the hypocrisy of #angrywhitemanistan.

Personally I quit standing for the National Anthem in about 2002, when George W. Bush invaded Iran in fake WMD reports. That the reports were not true is well documented so go read up on history before you argue about it. I was all in after 9/11 and for the invasion of Afghanistan (which I now know was stupid on my part; the 9/11 bombers were from Saudi Arabia and UAE, two nations we're not going to touch; bin Laden was not in Afghanistan and the mess we made in the Middle East created ISIS).

But Iraq, that was ridiculous and petty and a little hypocritical because the US put Hussein in charge of Iraq during the war with the Ayatollah in Iran. We armed Iran. Then we're going to take them down because oil? Nah nah nah. I was never a fan of Hussein but betrayal is betrayal.

And of course W had to finish the war daddy started.

This was 15 years ago. America is getting worse. For 8 years I had to listen to whiny crybabies who couldn't handle having a Black man in charge (note: I'm not Obama's #1 fan because I don't think he had enough spine. He was too nice. Jimmy Carter syndrome). And the intense hatred... I wish you all would just be honest and admit it, you're racist. Because even an honest racist is better than a hypocritical racist. (And that's a very small meter).

I have First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful protest (for now) and I exercised them. I haven't stood for the Anthem in ages. If I stood for the pledge I dropped "under God" because that is not how the Pledge was written and it violates separation of church and state.

And you know what? For 15 years nobody bothered me about it. No one heckled me or shouted abuse at me or even bothered to ask me why.

Our rights are slowly being eroded. Racism and bigotry are not only unchecked but encouraged by the fucking President of the United States. I really wonder about people who see nothing wrong with what's going on today but are all up in football players' faces. WTF is wrong with people? Protest racism not protesters.

Hmm. I think I'll make that a hashtag, if it isn't already. #protestracismnotprotesters

And don't expect me to stand for the National Anthem anytime soon.