3862

Seriously? That’s your take away?

None. I despise most of the people running on the R ticket. That said I do have respect for Paul’s stance on those two areas.

Which is two more areas than the other candidates. I only qualify the statement to allow for some theoretical non crazy candidate to take some sane positions too.

The person I want to win is Bernie, but it’d be nice for there not to be the prevalent foreign policy for one party be ‘bomb them all’

3863

I studied Leni Riefenstahl myself. Triumph of the Will and the Nazis propaganda machine had a lot of advancements for film at the time. The content is pretty bad, but when it comes to artsy folks, it’s not always obvious what they’re getting excited about. People who like Star Wars can appreciate some of the shots Riefenstahl did even if what she did for the Nazis was horrific.

Just to be clear, I don’t really consider myself that artsy, and I have a really hard time watching Triumph of the Will… still, but part of my well-rounded education gave me a glimpse of what the production of these pieces did for us on a film level.

not just picking on you Papageno… I just know there’s been a few remarks on this film, and those may still be valid but I want to make sure we know why these are taught in education system outside just racists material kind of thing.

3864

@Nesrie
I get that Triumph of the Will represented a major advance in film narrative and that’s why people still study it. My comment was aimed more at the professor rising and applauding at the scene where the KKK “heroically” ride in in Birth of a Nation.

3865

Right, and my point is like Triumph of the Will, Birth of a Nation has significance for film. Short of just googling the hell out of it, i can’t remember if that particular scene was one of them or not. It might be.

3866

I have taught the movie. The point is not whether that scene in particular is something to get excited about in a cinematic way. The point is that standing up and applauding when the scene plays can not be justified by mere cinematic excitement, specially if you are teaching the movie and are seeing it for Nth time.

It is nutso.

And I like the film (the first half) and still consider it a fine piece of film-making that I enjoy watching and it is also incredibly racist and which message can’t be condoned at all (the second half, except for a couple shots like the one in question, is not really that interesting, though).

3867

Coming from someone who has been at the end of racism, I just give someone the benefit of the doubt if the only thing that might suggest this person is racists is because they react to one movie. Since I didn’t have that teacher as my teacher, I don’t know if there are other reasons to believe this individual had a problem. What i do know is almost every art teacher and professor I’ve ever had was a little… nutso, as you put it, over certain things that didn’t excite me. This movie definitely has film significance and I’m not going to auto put an art teacher in a racism camp because they reacted to it in class… not with that as the only context.

3868

Trump is pissed off at the Republican Party of Virginia. His outrage du jour is the VA GOP’s plan to require any primary-goers to sign a pledge saying that they are Republicans.

See, Virginia’s primaries are open to all voters (you can only vote in one), and the GOP has long wanted to limit theirs to only the hard nugget of non-RINOs. Trump on the other hand, tends to poll better if GOP-voting “independants” are allowed into the mix, so he views the pledge as a direct attack on him.

Trump angry! Trump SMASH! Also, I’m not sure that anyone thought to tell him that most state-wide Republican party organizations are controlled by the RNC… that’s kind of the point of the RNC, right?

Anyway, the Virginia GOP responded by saying that silly “loyalty oaths” are commonplace in Virginia primaries (even the Democrats use them sometimes), and also: shut up.

One Virginia GOP rep blasted Trump with his own Tweet (wherein he called The Donald a “MORON!”), and he was immediately set upon by the angry hordes of Trump supporters. Their angry and lewd replies often accompanied by obscene images probably didn’t have anything to do with the fact that the representative (David Ramadan) is one of the vanishingly-rare GOP republicans of Lebanese descent, I’m certain.

3869

Gallup just released a fairly meaningless and silly poll: the most admired men and women in the US.

In what must make her campaign quite happy, Hilary Clinton tops the list of the most admired women, with 13% of the respondents picking her. Malala Yousafzi is a distant second at 5%, followed by Oprah at 4%.

For men, President Obama tops the list at 17%, followed by Pope Francis at 5%.

Oh, wait - there’s actually a tie for second place among men and it’s… ah… huh. Turns out Donald Trump is just as admired as the Pope. Wow.

Just to note, although Hilary and Obama top their respective genders, this is NOT actually a new thing… they’ve both topped the list for many years now, and their current scores are both significantly below their previous highs (16% for Clinton and 23% for Obama).

3870

Trump’s new nonsense tactic is to have his lackeys say that he’s the same as Ronald Regan. Which is, of course, absurd on its face.

Now, I realize many folks here hate Reagan for various reasons, but in no way is trump at all comparable to Regan.

3871

Modern-GOP-Reagan isn’t remotely comparable to Reagan, much less Trump.

3872

The more I think about the comparison of Reagan and Trump, the more I realize how fucked the GOP really is.

3873
3874

I say it half jokingly, but is there a Republican out there who hasn’t compared themselves to Reagan?

As a Democrat, i don’t hate Reagan, but it does worry me a little that some Republicans seem to almost worship him like a deity.

3875

Yes, this is it exactly. Both films are important and should be viewed and studied when studying film. Applauding the Klan and getting misty over Hitler is nutso though. I had a friend who dropped the course because it made him uncomfortable. I’d had many crazy teachers to that point in my life and his obvious racism never manifested itself towards students so I stuck it out.

He was crazy in other ways as well. But he also knew his stuff and had some really rare films in his collection including an out take reel of original pieces of film collected off the floor during the editing on King Kong. (He was old but not that old. He acquired them somewhere along the line.)

Anyway, sorry for the sidebar. Suffice to say that I went to school in Albany in the early 90’s and witnessed plenty of racism in the classroom environment, from students and from this particular teacher. (At a time when I wondered if I was perhaps becoming conservative, I credit one rabid conservative in my history of the 60’s class for confirming once and for all that, nope, I am not and will never be politically conservative. (which is not to slander my sane conservative friends. My beliefs just don’t run that way.))

3876

It worries me more that they don’t actually worship him, but some strange fictionalized version of him that didn’t exist. It was like 30 years ago, not 300 or 3000, you can’t just make shit up about him. We have lots of footage of the man and the like.

3877

People are worshipping the character Reagan played in the White House production of “I’m The President?”, not the man himself. It is better to look like a leader than to be one. This has been true in politics since at least the time of Caesar Augustus and probably before.

3878

Records from the era are spotty at best.

3879

Yes. I mean, from just the politically biased accounts of Tacitus and Suetonius it’s hard to say for sure what these men were like back in the 70s and 80s.

3880

Great Communicator my ass. More like The Acting “President”.

3881

Ben Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, and communications director, Doug Watts, have both resigned effective immediately.