Musings on the Lord's Day

Cool mornings now. I keep the windows closed for an hour or two after getting up.

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Went last night with Mr B to see Captain Phillips, about Somali pirates. Reminds me of the galactically alien worlds that exist on this one planet. B wisely noted that this is about as close to The War Movie as Hollywood can make, given how conflicted it is about who's side it's on. ExC noted that it was hard to find a War On Terror movie that was not essentially anti-American.

But the sympathetic humanization of the pirates in this one was not absent, given the involvement of Tom Hanks (who thinks we fought Japan in WWII because we were racists and they were non-Christian heathens). And the hero, though he did act heroically throughout, collapses in hysteria in the end. Not your Old Time War Movie, but what we can come up with now.

It did not escape my notice that we have a two-dozen plus male crew, headed by Americans, who wind up hiding in the basement from four scrawny Africans. The cultural low point was having a pie-paced Murrican identify himself as a 25-year Union member and refuse to get involved in gunplay. Way too much symbolism in this paragraph...

On a sheerly entertainment level, it was very engaging and tense and kept your attention the whole time. Having red-headed Italian-American Max Martini head the Seals team did not hurt. He and the captain of the US ship both had a combo of smarts and coolness under fire that makes them sterling characters.

To the extent that this movie at all represents the reality of piracy these days, it is head-shakingly unreal that merchant vessels do not regularly carry armed men on board. What took a team of Seals and three US warships to accomplish could be prevented with a just few mercenaries riding shotgun on these ships.

And, of course, (this being ExC), it is head-shakingly unreal that America allows Somalis in as immigrants. But then, (this being ExC), "America" may be just a memory now. Odoacer is presiding over the sack.

B, who not infrequently falls asleep watching movies, was wide awake the whole time. We went from there to a local bar. Full of happy boozing White people singing country music, just two subway stops from Castroland. Another galactically alien world.

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And this afternoon I go with Jeremy to see a Baroque concert at UC Berkeley. Yet another galactically alien world.

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My evil thoughts on the Renaming the Redskins controversy: if you allow a conquered minority to dictate to you how you can talk about them, then you are well on your way to being the conquered minority.

One of the besetting sins of modern Americans is the need to see ourselves as nice. So the White Euro invasion and conquest of this continent gets spoken of as if it were Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. Using our own lie against us has been very successful. Foolish White People, etc.

Whenever you celebrate anything "multicultural" you are saying, "Thank God the Whites are not in charge anymore."

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Aaaand, to round off my musings, this story of a yet another group of feral Black yoofs beating up White people. This is not far from the Brooklyn neighborhood where my family comes from.  My sinful response, on the Lord's Day, is that unless people like this live in fear of you, they will see you as prey. And prey you will be.

Here endeth the Lesson.

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