‘the new death note is an (american) adaptation/reimagination’ ‘netflix is allowed creative license!’ ‘it’s just a movie’ ‘L is black so it’s ok!’
1. american =/= white. asians are the most underrepresented group of people in us television. light would’ve especially given them a unique role to break stereotypes in that he’s presented as intelligent, sexy, and ruthless, which contrasts how asians are actually represented (men are desexualised, women are sexualised)
2. do you not think it’s highly suspicious that they’ve set it up so that the White Guy With The God Complex kills the Ominous Hooded Black Man
3. this ‘adaption’ falls so flat because japan shapes light’s sense of justice. it specifically comes down to japan’s justice system in which most cases don’t make it to a prosecutor/court whereas in america money makes a huge difference in yr defense. basically light’s sense of justice is based heavily on the fact that many criminals never got a conviction (like misa’s parents?) & he deemed them guilty based on the facts that were available to him, whereas an american light’s solution to injustice will be very different to light’s initial screening-his-victims approach ya feel (tldr: light’s sense of justice involves acting as the prosecution whereas an american light would just be going against rich ppl)
4. also like the above: japan is very racially & culturally homogeneous country. the crime narrative does not necessarily rely on race, whereas in america… yeah. it kind of does. so basically you’ve got, again, a white guy with a god complex killing people who aren’t white.
true true true true ^^^
death note is a story that’s almost contingent on japan’s justice system; light’s father and his squad (and L) are specifically and inherently japanese in their handling of crime. imho it could never translate to the united states in any way and maybe not even any other country’s, honestly
beyond that, whitewashing light (especially in the context of the united states, a non-homogenous country where white straight cis boys have the most privilege per capita and hold that privilege over nonwhite communities) turns the narrative from a sorta-grey-moral story of a young man who spirals into a complete, egotistical lack of control to…
…the story of a young white man who serial murders because of his own twisted sense of justice? as in…the story of most american serial killers, with a supernatural twist? yawn
beyond that, if they’re true to the original narrative and its nuances (which is a big if), we’ll see a brilliant, autistic-coded black man in L…defeated and ultimately killed by this bored, megalomaniac of a white child
There’s a case to be made that the cuts to scientific research are even more damaging, but probably the most harmful part of Trump’s proposed budget is the cuts to foreign aid programs. Actual foreign-aid-as-aid-instead-of-as-bribery is a relatively tiny fraction of U.S. spending, and it saves millions of lives; there are more than ten million people on PEPFAR, Bush’s HIV/AIDS program, alone, and there are no private organizations remotely poised to fill the gaps if these programs get cut as planned. If you live in the United States, I think it’s worth your time to call your representatives and say that you don’t support those cuts.
Foreign aid is tiny. Foreign aid that’s actually aid and not just aid-as-bribery is even tinier. And it’s the only thing the government does with my tax dollars that I’m unreservedly proud of. I encourage people to kick up a fuss about this one; even among a long list of bad budgeting decisions it stands out.
Yes, real foreign aid is tiny, but that just makes it more inexcusable. If so little government money is going to genuinely helpful aid, the private sector easily can step up to fill the gap, like they’re conspicuously doing with many other programs currently on the chopping block. It is not something to be proud of that the state takes money from people using threats and violence and gives it away to people on the other side of the world with no benefit to domestic taxpayers. It’s just token PR for a monstrous criminal organization currently bombing several of the countries most in need of aid. Instead of kicking up a fuss about the state not spending its ill-gotten gains the way you want and wasting time annoying congressional staffers who don’t care, why not work on organizing a replacement program that doesn’t depend on theft for its funding?
As I am sure you know, I devote lots of energy to increasing private charity and to making sure that it goes to impactful and well-run orgs. Cuts to foreign aid will not, as a question of actual fact, be replaced by private charity. I don’t care if it would be nice if that happened; it is simply not the case that if every American family got a tax refund for the whole amount spent on foreign aid (and they won’t; Trump’s proposed budget increases military spending by much much more than the savings from cutting foreign aid) they would direct that money to highly effective overseas aid programs.
That means that hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people will die if foreign aid is cut. It means that millions more will experience losses to their potential because of poor childhood nutrition and starvation.
I consider preventing hundreds of thousands of people from dying and millions from growing up impacted by severe starvation to be really important. It outweighs symbolic considerations like whether saving those lives makes the U.S. government look better than it deserves; making the U.S. government look worse does not stop a million deaths. I enthusiastically invite all organizations with bad PR to save a million lives a year to try to improve their reputation, and I do not think foreign aid has distracted anybody from calling our country the murder industrial complex it is.
And calling your Congresspeople works. There is nothing the average person can do with the five minutes it takes to call their Congresspeople which does more to save a million lives than making it known you oppose cuts to foreign aid; lobbying for Giving What We Can is great, but a phone call is absolutely a better use of the first five minutes of the day dedicated to fixing desperate international poverty.
And, last, on the ‘taxation is theft’ thing. I think letting millions of people die while having basically no effect on the taxation rate is a singularly stupid place to take a stand about your conviction that all taxation is illegitimate. “This action is technically by definition a member of a category most of the members of which are illegal’ is not a convincing argument. It is meaningless wordplay. The way to convince me that something is bad is to convince me that it causes harm, not that it bears a symmetric or formal resemblance to things that cause harm (and the specific argument here would have to be ‘the $5 a month that every American pays for all non-bribery foreign aid is more important than millions of people starving’, not just ‘the existence of taxes in general does more harm than millions of people starving’).
So please call your representatives and tell them you oppose cuts to foreign aid; it really matters, and it’s not too late.
Trump is threatening them if they vote against the bill, if you’re their constituent (or know someone who lives in their states), call them and make sure these reps know they answer to the American people and not to Trump.
Vote will take place on Thursday, March 23 – tell them to vote no on AHCA aka Trumpcare.
First Look at Tomm Moore’s New Film, ‘Wolfwalkers’
Cartoon Brew reports: Tomm Moore’s first two features, Cartoon Saloon’s The Secret of Kells
and Song of the Sea,
cemented his status as a storyteller and filmmaker of the first class,
while boosting Ireland’s animation scene into the global limelight,
earning him two Oscar nominations and countless other accolades. Now,
with Wolfwalkers, Moore is ready to deliver what he describes as the “final panel of our Irish folklore triptych.”
It’s an idea that Moore has been developing for years. Wolfwalkers tells the story of 11-year-old Robyn Goodfellow, a young apprentice
hunter who comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack of
wolves. Her life changes though after she saves a native girl, Mebh,
which leads to her discovery of the Wolfwalkers and transforms her into
the very thing her father is tasked to destroy. As he has done with earlier works, Moore uses Celtic folklore as a
window into our contemporary world. Thematic undercurrents of wilderness
versus order, and man’s impulse to control nature, are key to the world
of Wolfwalkers.
Embedded below is the film’s ‘concept trailer’. Enjoy!
A Middleground 