To be fair, this is after he got fired by his publisher after repeatedly demanding they deliver a new set of pencils to his house, preferably sending an attractive young woman to do it, a demand he believed they only refused because the company was run by greedy Jewish misers
I don't wanna like downplay his bigotry or come off as excusing it
But he's not this image people have of a kindly fatherly children's book writer with a hidden dark side
He was like this colossal piece of shit asshole
Dr. House if House were British and wrote books
He was a bigot because he lowkey hated everyone and if he came to highkey hate you in particular he'd unhesitatingly reach for whatever weapons presented themselves to hate you with greater force and let his hate do more damage
On House I remember people arguing this meant House wasn't really a racist or misogynist, "just a misanthrope", and he just found racism and misogyny a convenient way to insult someone if they were a minority or a woman
Okay but that IS racism and misogyny
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The theme of Au Revoir Les Enfants, a movie more people should see honestly
There are movies about committed Nazis, and movies about survivors and resisters, but not many movies about bystanders, which in reality the vast majority of people would be
People think a lot about Anne Frank's family in the attic, and they think about the Nazis who arrested them and the snooping snitch who called the Nazis on them
But not the many, many people who just went to work at that factory every day and just didn't care
What gets me about Au Revoir Les Enfants is that Père Jean isn't any kind of "movie hero"
He's a flawed person, he makes a really bad mistake and gets himself and his charges caught, he tried his best and his best was simply not good enough
He got taken in by the Jews for Jesus sales pitch, which sucks, but is also targeted narrowly at Jewish people and contains a bunch of crap that makes no sense to you if you're not Jewish
They baited this trap for unhappy vulnerable Jews and this stoned Gentile just wanders in
Like you're playing an FPS and you're trying to take down a helicopter with an anti-vehicle rocket and you somehow kill someone who's not in a vehicle
Like he just jumped up in front of you at the exact right time
I still love that Connie Willis passage where she talks about an engineer saying the obvious reason people hate smartphones is they *work too well* and he's going to make a fortune marketing a new smartphone whose selling point is that it *doesn't work*
The sarcasm is blistering and yet oddly compelling
The more you think about it the more it almost makes sense to buy a phone where, most of the time, when someone tries to call or text you it just doesn't go through, and you can honestly say "Yeah sorry my phone just does that"
When you try to load up Twitter it just doesn't do it
Your Twitter timeline is always several days behind so there's no point in commenting on or reacting to anything
Whenever you get mad at a video and try to reply to it, it times out
- Tom Swifties (so named because of people dunking on the cheesy old Tom Swift adventure stories), where every "he said/she said" line has a colorful verb + adverb
"I have PTSD and everyone treats it as a joke," Neville whined nebbishly
- "Eye-dialect", where you conve that someone speaks English in an accent different from your own by mangling the spelling of their words like an asshole
"Ach, jus' becau' a Scots dialec' is charact'riz'd bah glo'al stops don' mean yer hafta cover m'dialogue w'apostrophes"
People keep saying that if you want to get reelected you should just put your personal brand on government services, remind everyone their benefits come from you personally
Like how we all got a tax rebate check in the mail signed by Donald Trump
What's telling is how hard Obama resisted doing this, because he thought it was tacky, that it was misleading people about how the government actually works, and -- reasonably -- that there was a double standard where it'd be weaponized against him
But it was weaponized against him anyway
Like the Republicans turned "Obamaphones" into a goddamn meme that they wouldn't shut up about, they made the name "Obamacare" happen after months of relentless hammering