Via The Guardian, Macron wipes out Le Pen:
The centrist Emmanuel Macron is the next president of France, defeating his far right rival Marine Le Pen by a comfortable 65.1% to 34.9%, according to a usually reliable vote estimate by pollsters Ispos/Sopra Steria for French state TV and radio and Le Monde.
Vote estimates by other polling organisations for different French media show a broadly similar result, although some are showing marginal variations.
I exhale.
Also — don’t our obligations to Lafayette require us to perform a do-over of our recent 11/8 debacle?
ETA the inevitable:
Image: Jacques-Louis David, Design for the Republican costume, engraved by Vivant Denon, 1794.
Baud
We should give them the Statue of Liberty back.
Adam L Silverman
Here is what Macron is on record as stating he’ll do when elected:
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Any ideas what it should be replaced with?
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Something yuuge.
Yutsano
Austria, Holland, now France. Hoping Deutschland follows the example.
It doesn’t cure the disease that is rising intolerance in Europe, But it might show that it does have a peak there. Now if they would do better on the integration front it would help.
? ?? Goku ? ?
?? Vive La France! ??
Fuck you, ??
sharl
@schrodingers_cat: A replica of Jeff Sessions done up as a giant elf, shouting GO AWAY!
rikyrah
yeah France!
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@schrodingers_cat: My username
the Conster, la Citoyenne
I think the media blackout before the election matters. The first wikileaks hack release was the day after the pussy grabbing tape was released. Our media is the most responsible for the mess we’re in, and the least capable of self-reflection.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
I’m in moderation for using the word pu$$y. If there’s anything this blog needs after this election cycle is a new bad word filter given the degenerate in the WH.
Citizen_X
Le Pen’s still getting more than 27%, so the result could be better.
Gin & Tonic
Took nearly 75 years, but the French defeated the Nazis at last.
fatefullightning
Klepto-fascist scum overreached and are going to be in a world of hurt.
fatefullightning
@Citizen_X:
Our favorite number!
Calouste
@Yutsano: UKIP got wiped out in the local elections in the UK on Thursday. They held 146 seats (out of ~5000) before the elections, and after it they hold 1 (one).
dm
Hi, Tom, enjoyed the interview with you on the “What’s the Point?” podcast from fivethirtyeight (I like their two-part format — group discussion of the book then interview with the author).
Heaving a sigh of relief at the French results.
I enjoyed this article on how the French Twittersphere responded with satire to the #macronleaks hash-tag pushed by the US Alt-Right.
Especially liked the FN (Front Nationale) logo detourned with “Fake News” and “F Haine” (haine means “hatred”, and “FHaine” is pronounced the same as “FN” — or so I’m told.
Tokyokie
I have watched enough French movies to have figured out that the country’s moviegoers are sufficiently sophisticated that they don’t have to be placated with inevitable happy endings. So I figured this would be the election result, the opposite of that in a country enthralled by reality TV and movies based on comic books.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
For now. Zombie Nazis will be back, next election, and the next, and the next ….
How is the arm today?
JPL
@Yutsano: The Trump effect.
Elizabelle
@Calouste: Well that’s great to hear.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano:
Item 1:
Item 2:
germy
Right now, the NYTimes is looking at the French MSM and chuckling “Amateurs!”
Adam L Silverman
@sharl:
GregB
A win for the good guys.
japa21
Repeat of what I just posted below, because it is more appropriate to this post.
I have occasionally quoted a Chicago Sun Times columnist, Neil Steinberg. The following, however, is from his blog, which I just discovered http://www.everygoddamnday.com.
Today is the deciding run-off vote in the French presidential election, pitting nationalist bigot Marine Le Pen against centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron.
All indications point to Macron winning against the opponent he dubbed “the high priestess of fear.” And while shocks such as the one delivered in this country Nov. 8 are in the realm of possibility, smart money says the French, though also dissatisfied with politicians, are not willing to leap suicidally out of the European Union, like the Brits, nor hand their country over to foaming demagogues, as the United States has done.
They can learn from us. The hope of Americans learning from the French is a dicier proposition. We don’t look abroad for answers much, and when we do, we tend to limit our thinking and cherry pick our points, as this column from nearly a decade ago reminds us. Notice the foreshadowing of this week’s health care debacle.
The rest of his column is that column from a decade ago and it is outstanding.
LurkerNoLonger
@Calouste: I dream of the day when Republicans hold only 1 seat in congress. That one Republican…I don’t know…try to think of a Republican who isn’t an asshole? See, it’s hard to do.
Mike J
@Calouste:
Because the tories coöpted their platform.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic:
JPL
As President Trump congratulated Macron yet?
fatefullightning
@germy: I loved their headline yesterday: “French Election Hack Jolts a Race Full of Surprises”.
Hard not to see that as a deliberate reprise of “New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign in Race’s Last Days”.
germy
germy
@fatefullightning:
They know only one trick.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Gin & Tonic: Without even firing a shot too
sharl
@Adam L Silverman: Hahahahaha!
This dream – of an evil elf being brought to justice – will have to sustain me for now.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@JPL:
No.
JPL
@germy: lol
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: How surprising.
Adam L Silverman
@Tokyokie:
I will meet you on the village green at noon to seek satisfaction. Choose your second and your choice of dueling weapon…
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
My understanding is that a large part of America’s diplomatic power has always been that other countries usually follow our lead. Trump is going to be pro-Putin, if incompetently so, but it seems like everyone else will be united against him.
Mike J
dm
Here is the Guardian’s results page (at this writing 0% reporting).
Interesting feature on the Guardian page: they have a space to show the prevalence of “spoiled ballots” — basically, explicit abstentions. The BBC has been reporting that a lot of voters are dissatisfied with their choices, and planning abstentions (these reports had me remembering Nate Silver and his “Gee, there sure are a lot of people undecided” in the run-up to the US election). Apparently there is enough of a tradition of spoiling your ballot in protest that the French government actually reports the totals.
Elizabelle
@LurkerNoLonger: Charlie Dent. Republican and not an asshole. He led the revolt against TrumpCare.
But ask me to think of a second ? Ummmmm….
dm
@Tokyokie: And here I thought your nym suggested you were an anime fan.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@JPL: “Macron is weak. Fake News! Rigged!”
hitchhiker
Watching the clip from Casablanca, oof.
Last night at a baseball game in Seattle a choir from the Todd Beamer elementary school sang the Star Spangled Banner — didn’t know whether to feel loss or defiance or despair.
Resistance doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
Chris
You have no idea how relieved I am right now.
I did my part for the republic at the local embassy yesterday morning. Vive la France, indeed.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes and no. They follow our lead, but often it is because when we provide, or help provide, structural solutions to others we specifically avoid building them on our model. There is no country that we have helped since the end of WW II, regardless of whether it was a good or bad idea to do so, where we have recommended and helped them establish a governmental system that looks like ours. Even the few “federal” systems, such as Germany’s post Marshall Plan, isn’t federalism as Americans have ever understood it. Virtually everywhere we’ve recommended and helped to create some form of parliamentary system. Usually with proportional representation. Tells you something about our system and its actual utility and viability.
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: You sent me your resume, right?
fatefullightning
Delicious alt-right angst on /pol/ right now:
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Lady Liberty is pretty huge!
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
My interest mainly is in how it affects Putin if Trump is the only government he can suborn.
Tokyokie
@Adam L Silverman: How about lawn darts?
@dm: Well, I readily admit drawing distinctions between anime, manga or graphic novels and comic books when it suits my purposes. I like movies from Studio Ghibli, but I avoid those from Marvel Studios.
LurkerNoLonger
@Elizabelle: Alright, Dent is in. I’ll even take his brother Harvey.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
A gigantic “No Trespassing; Violators Will Be Persecuted” sign.
germy
@LurkerNoLonger: Harvey is notoriously two-faced.
Calouste
@Mike J: More because Farage ran away with his tail between his legs after he won, the next leader resigned after 2 months, and they have lost a number of MEPs and their sole MP. You can’t be a strongman party if you don’t show strong leadership.
The same explains the fall of AfD as mentioned by Adam above. They had a major leadership kerfuffle recently, and that just doesn’t do it for fascist-wannabees. Fascist voters don’t vote for fascism as much as they vote for the Leader, and if there is no strong leader, most of these voters will stay away.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
At least temporarily, that statue of Trump as a man-pig.
germy
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Chris: Good going! Didn’t know you had French citizenship. Must’ve missed it on a thread or something.
The American Republic is still in danger, but I am heartened at a comment by dm yesterday about BLM focusing on electoral politics and policies aimed locally
Mr Stagger Lee
I think the French noticed that Right/populists are all hat and no cattle look at when the UKIP talked how they would save the Health System of the UK via Brexit, and when it happened, nothing. They saw how trump was going to make America great again they see a shitshow of incompetent bumbling. The right populists(the Angry white MALES) talks a good game that ought to stay at the bar rooms.
dm
@schrodingers_cat:
Part of the seawall protecting the city from the results of melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Chet Murthy
@Elizabelle: Uh… Walter Jones? Not sayin’ he’s -good-. Just …. amongst the Rs …..
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
This makes my day. Bless you!
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: No argument there. If Macron does as he claims, he will be effectively taking France to, at least, cyberwar, against Russia. My understanding is that the other EU and NATO leaders view the problem the same way Macron does with the exception of Theresa May in Britain. Macron will have lots of support from Germany and Holland and the Baltic States and Finland and Norway and Sweden. Here too, as I’ve described on both front page and in comments, the US, thanks to the President, is both isolating itself and self diminishing itself.
Frankensteinbeck
@Calouste:
I don’t know. I feel like the Trump phenomenon is a strong argument against this. Fascists are more policy-oriented than almost anyone else, maybe more than us. Their priorities are just alien to us. Trump is visibly weak. He’s downright pathetic. But he offered them government-approved racism far beyond anything they’ve been offered before, and they flocked to him.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@dm: Bet you can’t figure out where my nym comes from
/s
Princess
Bernie would’ve won.
Too soon?
Adam L Silverman
@LurkerNoLonger: Nah, Harvey’s a flip flopper.
Caravelle
Reposting from the “Spam” thread, for context:
The margin SHOULD have been big. The FN isn’t like the Republican Party, a mainstream governing party that routinely gets around 50% of votes in national elections. Its scores have been steadily going up since it was founded in the 70s and have historically been in the 10-20% ranges:
http://www.france-politique.fr/elections-fn.htm
With 35% Le Pen doubled her father’s score from 2002; it looks offhand like the highest score the FN’s ever had on a national level, and the most votes it’s ever received (11 million or so to 2012’s 6.4 million and the first round’s 7.6 million). At this point I’m mostly happy that she wasn’t the leading candidate in the first round because she very well could have been and talk about *that* symbol.
Yes, I know in this post-Brexit, post-Trump world we can’t take things for granted so it’s really, really good that she didn’t win or come any closer than she did but that margin still is a step in the wrong direction. An expected step in a direction we’ve been going in for awhile now, but still bad.
Also reposting this on the Trump comparison:
The difference with what happened in the USA (and Brexit) is that Trump was an extreme candidate running in a mainstream party that’s been moving towards extremism, and Le Pen is the candidate of an extreme party who’s been trying to brand herself as mainstream. Trump had all of the system inertia pushing him along, while Le Pen has been fighting this inertia her whole life and still has to in this election. Americans hear “Republican” and think “legitimate politician who could run the country”; French people hear “FN” and think “Neonazis” (whether as “they’re not neonazis tho” or whatever FN voters tell themselves, or as “this can’t be allowed to happen again”, the impetus for the demonstrations against them). Those are the baselines; “But Trump is terrible” or “Marine Le Pen doesn’t sound that bad” are second-order thinking.
You know all of the political and media angst about “normalizing” Trump ? French politics and media have been angsting about how to avoid normalizing the FN for as long as I can remember, i.e. since the 90s at least. And every victory and advance they make makes it harder to justify treating them as outsiders; so in a way they’ve been moving in the direction of normalizing the FN while US media is (or should be, if only for the last three months) moving in the opposite direction. I think the same is true in other European countries with far-right/neonazi parties that have been getting higher and higher profiles in the last 30 years. But when you look at where both started it makes it clear why the FN is still not in a position to win a presidential election (yet? :( another doubling of the FN vote and they’re there!) while Trump turned out to be.
Frankensteinbeck
@Princess:
Given how often I hear them whining this, and particularly claiming that the Democrats in general are at fault for not loudly proclaiming the hard left policies they’re sure the nation is waiting for, no. It’s never too soon if they’ve already started.
fatefullightning
@Adam L Silverman:
That outcome on its own makes the active measures campaign a success in Putin’s eyes.
Elizabelle
@Caravelle:
Perceptive comment.
dm
@Tokyokie: If you get a chance, go see “Your Name”. Not Studio Ghibli, but a reason to not fear Miyazaki’s retirement all the same.
I think the Marvel movies get something of a bum rap. I’m slowly making my way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe TV-shows streaming on Netflix (Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and now Daredevil). By and large, I like them a lot more than the movies — they’re more gritty urban fantasy than special-effects.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Caravelle:
I think that’s starting to change
ericblair
@Adam L Silverman:
The West in general and NATO have spent a lot of effort in the last couple of years defining cyber as a domain of war and the legal ramifications of combat there (this gets important when you talk about active cyber countermeasures). Going forward, the West is going to be on a lot more solid ground when responding to state-backed attacks.
Caravelle
@Gin & Tonic: You missed the bit 15 years ago where we defeated Nazis “at last” for the first time. Sob.
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I agree that the media blackout and other regulations limiting political speech in the run-up to elections matter. The problem (as far as holding lessons for the US goes), is that those are legal restrictions. I gather the US used to have similar with the Fairness Doctrine ? Either way, my point is I don’t think you can count on the media to self-regulate in this.
Calouste
@Frankensteinbeck: Trump is weak and pathetic, but his supporters bought into the whole “successful businessman” myth and think he is strong. It’s all about perception. Trump’s support will collapse if he is no longer seen as strong, and he knows that, so when there is a crisis he will overreact.
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
“I love the French. Beautiful, very beautiful people, believe me. I own many very beautiful, terrific properties all over France. Now watch this putz.”
Mike J
@Princess:
Corbyn is showing us what a Bernie led party would look like.
dmsilev
@dm:
I’d second this recommendation. I saw it a few weeks ago; it’s excellent.
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
I’ll stand up for a couple of Marvel movies: the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are a hoot, and the animated Big Hero 6 owes as much to Studio Ghibli as it does to Marvel, probably because it was made by Walt Disney Animation Studios with a minimum amount of meddling from Marvel.
dm
@Princess: But what would he have run on? They already have adequate universal health care, a 35-hour work-week, parental leave, and affordable college.
Which is what I think when I hear how solving the economic equality problem will solve racial and women’s issues in its wake — the Europeans have that, and they still have a third of their voters going for right wing nationalism.
(Though I suppose the leftist candidate — who came in a close fourth in the first round — probably would have won, too…..)
Adam L Silverman
@fatefullightning: Yep. This isn’t the selective leadership or informal leadership, for lack of better terms, that the Obama Administration pursued where coalition partners were foregrounded and US involvement ran in the background. Rather it is a quite clear recognition by allies, partners, and even competitors that at least for the time being the US is abandoning its role as primary promoter of the international rule making systems that make up the system of systems that is the post WW II and post Cold War international order. As such we see allies like Australia and New Zealand begin to gravitate towards the PRC. We see allies like the Philippines, albeit here some of the issue is that Duterte is a bugfuck nuts homicidal tyrant wannabe, also doing so. And in Europe we will continue to see a reordering around Germany and France as the political and strategic leaders within the NATO alliance, even as the US maintains the military lead. The latter will only last until one of our NATO partners invokes Article 5 and we fail to heed the call. Or the Supreme Allied Commander-Europe (SACEUR) decides to do so regardless of the 4,000 mile long screwdriver grinding in the other direction from DC.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m not sure how easy the comparison between trump and other Fascist-type leaders should be. He’s very different from the others in that he took over an existing major party rather than building up his own party from nothing*. It’s hard to exaggerate how much that helped him. trump himself didn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a candidate, but by gaining the imprimatur of an existing major party, he was granted formal status as a serious candidate no matter how little his actual qualifications and policy proposals justified it. As the leader of his own party, trump would have been an after-thought; as leader of the Republicans he managed to keep the election close enough to steal.
*OK, I know that the Nazi party actually existed before Hitler took it over, and I think something similar happened with other fascist parties. Still, they were effectively nothing on the national scale when they became fascist and had to be built up to be worth anything.
Adam L Silverman
@ericblair: Yes. And hopefully.
Tokyokie
@dm: Your Name played around here for a week, and I didn’t have the chance to see it. I’ve been wary of the U.S. home video versions of Studio Ghibli films because of my loathing for Disney (and I’m pissed off over how Disney slow-played Kaze tachinu to better the chances for one of its own films for the animation Oscar) and because a lot of the DVD releases didn’t include the Japanese soundtracks. But I was looking at some Ghibli Blu-rays at the video store recently, and they all seemed to have Japanese dialogue and English subtitles, so I’m going to start running all those down, including Your Name. Only I’ll have to rent all of them, because the anime discs I’ve gotten from the library look like somebody let a Popsicle melt on them before returning them.
eclare
@dmsilev: Major x4 also recommended it
Calouste
@Caravelle: I think this is the high point for Marine Le Pen. Her dad dropped from 2nd to 4th in the 2007 presidential election. With an increased profile comes increased scrutiny and increased expectations. Also she is now talking about disbanding the FN, but, as I pointed out above, things like disbanding your own party are not “strong”, and project the wrong image for a strongman party.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@JPL:
3:22 – tweeted out a begrudging congratulations.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@dm: Yep, but they set a record for “votes blancs et nuls” this election. Check out the graphic on this page tracking abstention votes over the years:
http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2017/05/07/presidentielle-un-record-de-bulletins-blancs-et-nuls_5123805_4355770.html
Blue bars are first-round abstention rates, orange bars are second-round.
dm
@Tokyokie: The Studio Ghibli stuff handled by Disney has been run by John Lasseter, from Pixar, who is a personal friend of Miyazaki’s. They have been treating that stuff well (even on DVD).
I’ve been amazed by the length of the run of Your Name here. I expected it to get a week in the theaters here, too, but it’s still running. Deserves it. Makoto Shinkai (the director) has finally come into his own.
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
The recent Disney DVD releases of Studio Ghibli films are much better because the Big Cheese at the animation studios is not only a huge Ghibli fan, he’s become friends with Miyazaki-san. Any disk produced after, say, 2008 should be pretty good, though usually still dubbed.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
As far as the alt-right is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Most of them are isolationists who are against any kind of multilateral action, and even the non-isolationist ones think the US should go it alone with our military and not bother with having allies.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle:
Kind of a late response. I was outside doing some one-handed yard work.
I’m down to a removable plastic splint/brace. The pins are out, but funny thing – if you immobilize a complex joint for seven weeks, it takes time to get functionality back. So while I have a little bit of use of my right hand, emphasis is on “little.” I’m not supposed to lift anyhtning heavier than a cup of coffee. I see a physical therapist once a week, and see my surgeon again in a month.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
35%, just like Trump’s approval rating.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Tokyokie: We just saw Your Name at the local art house theater and thoroughly enjoyed it, and we’re not big anime fans. The version we saw was subtitled, but the same theater also had the dubbed version. They did that with at least one recent French animated movie as well, showing both the dubbed and subtitled versions.
I always got the impression my wife and I were a distinct minority in our preference for hearing original language in films, so I’m glad there’s enough of a market to support these subtitled releases.
Ella in New Mexico
@LurkerNoLonger:
There actually are a few out there…sadly, they currently do not hold office. if we can kill this new “Ayn Rand meets Uber Christian Rightie” incarnation, maybe some of them will return and fight for things like clean air and Medicare again.
Princess
@Mike J: He is, isn’t he.
BBA
Given Macron’s personal life, we should really be singing “Hot for Teacher” right now.
Calouste
@Mnemosyne: They’re not isolationists, they just don’t want to help other countries. They’d still be more than happy to throw a small country up against the wall to make sure the others listen. If they were really isolationist in the non-interference sense, like the US was between the World Wars to some extent, they be calling for the defense budget to be cut by at least 2/3. Because with two large oceans as defense, the US doesn’t really need that much military.
bystander
@JPL: I’m hoping President Obama gives Macron a big shout out from the JFK awards tonight. That out to set twitler off on a tirade.
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
Okay, I had to look up the English translation for Kaze tachinu but I have to tell you, not even The Wind Rises was going to beat the worldwide juggernaut that was Frozen in 2013. Sorry, that was never going to happen.
Elie
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Naw — its on US — those of us on the left and right who had been conned for weeks and months about “Hillary”. They had plenty of information to see what Trump was about and STILL picked him or defaulted by voting for Jill Stein. People who voted for Jill Stein consciously chose to be blind — they had plenty of information about Trump. So I get your general point and agree that our media is lame — but not THAT lame. There was plenty of information out there for people that were going to value information. We have some other kind of soul sickness that while the media has its problems, the creature in the mirror is us.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Calouste:
That kinda ended when ICBMs and long range bombers were invented
Caravelle
@Calouste: That’s possible. As for disbanding the FN, I hope you’re right – I was thinking it would have the opposite effect, freeing her of the negative connotations of the FN and allowing her to rebrand as something more relevant to the current political atmosphere.
Besides I don’t know if dissolving your own party is as bad as you suggest. The FN is a fixture, for sure, but many other French parties (including most notably the mainstream right-wing party that does routinely win elections) are constantly being disbanded and re-formed. Especially in the context of a party Le Pen essentially inherited, it can be seen as a purge to rid the party of the unworthy and unreliable and a refocusing around the leader’s unique vision – a move pretty typical of strongmen leaders actually, no?.
Adam L Silverman
@Ella in New Mexico: Anyone ever wonder just how Ayn Rand was allowed to leave the Soviet Union?
Tokyokie
@Mnemosyne: A few years ago, I ran down every Ghibli release available at the time. I have a Hong Kong boxed from the late 1990s, although some of those are pretty bad copies, and I filled in the gaps mostly by finding bit torrents of some of the European releases of the films (mostly Italian versions, as I recall, and I had to add a subtitle track on a couple). I’ll begin hunting down all the Ghibli releases in a month or so, but I’ll check for the foreign Blu-rays of those titles I either can’t find or that lack the original dialogue tracks. (German and Italian discs, as I recall, usually include English subtitles, but French ones rarely do. (Thus the gaps in my Melville collection.) Spanish discs also usually lack English subtitles, but a lot of interesting American films like Bob Aldrich’s Attack! and Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick that haven’t come out on Blu-ray domestically are available in Spain.)
Adam L Silverman
@BBA: He’s in a Van Halen cover band?
LurkerNoLonger
@Ella in New Mexico:
This right here is what makes my skin crawl about the current crop of Republicans. The dishonesty of that squared circle emanates from every one of them like stink lines in a cartoon.
cain
@Adam L Silverman: hey you want mine too? :)
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Tokyokie: I remember seeing Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle when they aired on Cartoon Network when they aired in the mid-2000s. Barely remember then tho. You can stream practically anything these days if you know where to look. Just be careful of pop-ups
Running used to be really bad. Just look at some of the DBZ dubs for evidence. Post 2000 it’s gotten really good. The Dragon ball anime english dub is actually better quality wise then early funimation DBZ dub
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Ella in New Mexico:
Ayn Rand meets Adolf Hitler, more like
Adam L Silverman
@cain: You work in the defense, national security, homeland security, intelligence, and/or foreign policy sector? Or are trying to? If so, sure, send it.
Tokyokie
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I won’t watch any film that’s dubbed into a different language. (Although Italian films of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were not shot with sync sound, and the actors would speak their native languages and would be dubbed post-production. Thus Richard Basehart speaks Italian in La strada, and Claudia Cardinele speaks English in C’era una volta il West. So those don’t count.) When a movie, even an animated one, is dubbed, you miss the inflection of the native-language speaker’s voice, and that bothers me. So much so that I deleted my rip of something as inconsequential as King Kong vs. Godzilla because it included only the English-dubbed version.
Another Scott
@Caravelle: I thought LePen gave up being head of FN about a week ago? How can she disband a party that she doesn’t head?
Oh, it was “temporary”.
You mean that her statement last week was posturing?!?1
(This-is-my-shocked-face.gif)
Don’t get me started on how much that sounds like Wilmer. Please, don’t… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@Adam L Silverman:
Sadly, I don’t have any background in that.. although the whole thing seems fascinating to me. I mostly a technologist who can deal with open source communities, write code, and do marketing. I probably would have to delete my twitter account if I want to even apply for anything given my bias.
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne: How do they compare to Dr. Strange? Just wondering b/c I tried watching it yesterday, gave up around when he starts playing with time. Couldn’t stand the acting, so wooden. And I typically like Cumberbatch. I thought to myself: “he musta got paid a ton up-front for this stinker”.
Maybe if other Marvel movies are better than Dr. Strange, it might be worth trying again?
ETA: And Chwetel Ejofor (sp?) !! He was coated in plasticine! I’ve only ever seen him on Serenity, and he was … incandescent in that movie! Wha … wha happen?
Ruckus
@japa21:
You have to respect someone who calls their blog, everygoddamnday.
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
If you’re a decent lip-reader, it can be fun to watch Italian films from the pre-synch sound era to see what languages people are speaking. Multilingual actors like Christopher Lee can be spotted speaking different languages in different shots depending on what their co-actors in the scene were most comfortable speaking.
Shalimar
@schrodingers_cat: A massive gold-plated toilet. Hopefully, they can finish it in time so that Trump can press the flush button at the unveiling.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
I like the Guardians movies because they take the characters seriously, but don’t take the plots seriously. So the fact that, say, Rocket Raccoon is in major physical and psychological pain because scientists ripped him apart and turned him into a genius cybernetic raccoon is a poignant scene, but they still acknowledge within the plot that it’s funny that an ill-tempered talking raccoon is one of the characters. Does that make sense?
hovercraft
From The Guardian live blog:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/may/07/french-presidential-election-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen
Some interesting numbers from Mathieu Gallard of pollsters Ipsos:
About 43% of Macron’s voters cast their ballot for him to keep out Le Pen; only 39% of voters would like the new president to have an absolute majority in the new parliament after legislative elections next month; taking into account abstentions and spoiled ballots, roughly 44% of people on the electoral roll voted for Macron – similar to De Gaulle in 1965 (45%), Mitterrand in 1981 (43%) and 1988 (44%) and Sarkozy in 2007 (43%).
The parliamentary majority figure shows how hard the new president is going to have to work to get his programme implemented.
Rob Lll
Well, that’s good news– and not just for France. I’m in Stuttgart now watching the Paris celebrations live on TV in a bar. Everyone here seems pretty relieved. Vive la France!
Chet Murthy
@Mnemosyne: Ha! OK, on my queue!
bystander
Watching the festivities in Paris on MSNBC. The DJ deal facing the Tuileries from the Louvre is incredibly cheesy. The dancers are like from Folies Bergeres with balloon sculpture helmets. Why?
Peter Baker of the Times was talking about how sometimes Trump speaks more “honestly” than other POTUSs. Less filtered, less nuanced, less diplomatic is not more honest.
Mnemosyne
@Chet Murthy:
Oh, and if you like Chiewetel Ejiofor, rent Talk to Me. It was meant to be a showcase for Don Cheadle, but Ejiofor steals the movie right out from under him.
BBA
@Adam L Silverman: No, because his wife is…oh, never mind.
Adam L Silverman
@BBA: I got it the first time.
zhena gogolia
@bystander:
And not knowing when the Civil War was is not “refusing to go by the book”!!!!!!!
Caravelle
@Another Scott: You tell me, I heard about the disbanding thing here and you’ve just informed me about the running “supported by” the FN (though I’m not that surprised). My ignorance of the politics in France this cycle is shocking, for some reason I could only bring myself to learn enough to know that Benoit Hamon is too good for this world (recently learned his economic advisor is Picketty’s wife, wot!) and Le Pen was running, which I’m pretty sure is all I needed to know to vote correctly anyway.
germy
@zhena gogolia:
His entire academic career…
MomSense
@? ?? Goku ? ?:
Spirited Away was fantastic and terrifying.
Your nym always makes me smile. Spent a lot of time playing with Dragon Ball Z action figures and watching the cartoons. Then there was the time my kid told the hairdresser he wanted his hair to look like Goku. We went home with a lot of hair product that day.
germy
Saw this question asked over at LGM:
Interesting question and now I’m curious. I don’t know much about French news.
Patricia Kayden
@BBA: It’s nice that the French people didn’t appear to be phased by his wife’s age as it is completely irrelevant to his qualifications. I guess not every country is enraptured by petty gossip and National Enquirer-like “news”. Hope he does well for his country but anyone is better than the Nazi.
Shalimar
@Adam L Silverman: Was it unusual for 20 year old Jewish girls from moderately prosperous St. Petersburg families to be granted visas to visit American relatives at the time? I never thought about it, because there doesn’t seem to be much sign that she was a horrible person before she started putting her writing out into the world.
philadelphialawyer
@hovercraft: But:
French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s party is set to emerge as the largest in June parliamentary elections, according to an OpinionWay-SLPV Analytics poll for Les Echos, the newspaper said on Wednesday.
Mnemosyne
@bystander:
Because, contrary to popular belief, the French are just as likely to have bad taste as the rest of us, but they’re able to play it off better when it comes up.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@? ?? Goku ? ?: Running should be dubbing. Damn autocorrect
hovercraft
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/may/07/french-presidential-election-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen
37m ago
16:20
Libération has some fun facts on France’s new president, in case you were feeling this this was all getting a bit heavy. They include:
He’s the first French president to be called Emmanuel.
His name is only worth nine Scrabble points, the lowest tally of any president of the Fifth Republic and way fewer than Sarkozy (34).
He is 1.73 metres tall, six centimetres less than the French average and one centimetre less than Marine Le Pen.
He likes Johnny and Halliday and Charles Aznavour, and once said wine was “the soul of France”.
His dog, an Dogo Argentino, is called Figaro.
ETA: Guardian link
? ?? Goku ? ?
@MomSense: Ha! How did that turn out?
ThresherK
@Adam L Silverman: Ben Judah says (and I appreciate)
Who’s up for a new Monroe Doctrine to keep Russians from screwing around in this hemisphere?
Raoul
@japa21: The piece from 8 years ago is good. The one thing I’ll note is, we just drove around Normandy a few weeks ago. And the privatized toll road system sucks. It is very expensive, but they still don’t have a real toll-tag system on much of the part we drove.
So all the people with transponders still have to drive thru plazas with arms and a full stop for each and every vehicle. Traffic jams at toll plazas were a kilometer long. And there were multiple plazas en route.
So maybe the French used to have good socialist roads. But now they have shitty capitalist ones.
Beyond that, though, I will join the many who are heaving sighs of relief over this election. And I hope May and Merkel are paying a lot of damn attention to Russian hacking. FFS.
Adam L Silverman
@Shalimar: Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union were, routinely, prohibited from traveling. Eventually the lock down on their ability to move around, both internally and externally, gave rise to the term refusenik, meaning to have been refused permission to travel (specifically abroad). As for her being a horrible person – she always was. When she arrived in the US she leeched off her relations here, never paying them back and giving them no end of grief over the years. She continued to be a leech and horrible person, both personally and professionally, throughout her life. Both before and after she achieved success.
Adam L Silverman
@ThresherK: I’m working on it. Nag, nag, nag…
Chris
@Adam L Silverman:
(Sorry, was out for a couple hours when you sent this). Yes, I did – why do you ask?
Chris
@? ?? Goku ? ?:
I have both citizenships, though I’ve lived in America for most of my life, and after the AHCA last Thursday, I really needed some good news in the political realm. Thank God, this was it.
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: Wanted to make sure I had it. May have someone to (finally) show it to.
Chris
@Calouste:
I’m worried about the fact that LR (formerly UMP, the traditional center-right party) has collapsed almost as completely as the PS, and where its voters go from there. There was polling in 2012 that suggested that most UMP voters would’ve actually preferred a coalition with the FN to one with the center left if they’d won. It’s doubtful that that would’ve been put into practice, but the point is that there are a ton of these people who’re the next worst thing to an FN voter. And now they may not have another party to rally to anymore.
I certainly hope 35% is her ceiling. The next five years are going to be interesting in terms of seeing how the political scene is redrawn, now that the traditional left and right have collapsed while the center and far left have surged.
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: If you have an updated version send it to me.
Chris
@Calouste:
“Isolationist” never really meant “isolationist” – the pre-World-War-One and inter-war governments supported plenty of interventions in Latin America and the Pacific, in the grand tradition of picking up little countries and throwing them against the wall. “Isolationist” mostly meant “stay out of European affairs,” which really meant “never pick on people your own size, or bigger.” Until the World Wars, the only time we broke that rule was the Spanish-American War, and the Spanish Empire so far gone at that point that it didn’t really count anymore.
MomSense
@? ?? Goku ? ?:
It was high maintenance! She had to keep his hair long and then we would mound it into triangle like shapes and then plaster it with hair gel. I was this close to using twist ties or pipe cleaner to provide structure.
Gel needed to be reapplied throughout the day. He loved it, though.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@Chris: Posting this from upstairs: I had it explained to me that this should be expected mostly because of the recent terror attacks and Le Pen presenting herself more moderately than her father ever did a decade ago
Chris
@Adam L Silverman:
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks kindly! Just done. Does this mean your own job problems with bureaucratic congestion have cleared up?
Chris
@? ?? Goku ? ?:
Yeah, she’s been trying to present a “respectable” face in contrast to her father’s party. The entire Lee Atwater speech about switching to dogwhistles applies here.
? ?? Goku ? ?
@MomSense: Glad to hear he enjoyed it. Anime hair is weird looking in real life. Did he have it dyed blonde too?
SiubhanDuinne
The TCM-Fathom Events “big screen” movies are transmitted more or less monthly, on Sundays, at 2:00 and 7:00, and the following Wednesdays at the same times. I generally go to the Wednesday matinee, but when they show Casablanca in November (the 12th and 15th, for those keeping score at home), my current plan is to go to all four screenings. I love the movie that much, and so rarely have a chance to see it on a proper-sized screen.
No, I don’t think I’ll get sick of it.
Elizabelle
@bystander: Peter Baker of the Fuck the Fucking New York Times is one of the worst Trump normalizers out there. Republican-fellating sleazebag.
zhena gogolia
@SiubhanDuinne:
We just read a fun book about it by Noah Isenberg. Now we have S. Z. Sakall’s memoir out on Interlibrary Loan.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks! Isenberg is in my queue, and I’ll have a look at Sakall soon. Appreciate the recommendations!
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: You don’t need to know… Please stay right where you are. It will make it much easier on the drone pilot…//
J R in WV
@Patricia Kayden:
In France, a beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, her age is immaterial. So his wife is just another good looking person married to a guy who happened to become politically important.
That’s my take on it anyway. I guess there may have been some people who voted against him on that account. But what category of folks at large would that have been? Nope, not really a factor in such a big win.
Ithink
@Tokyokie:
This was singlehandedly the best commentary I’ve heard or read yet regarding the parallel phenomena of our recent 2016 Electoral debacle and the timely and the resounding French Republic victory over the Rising Tides of Neo-Fascism that occurred today. Please comment more often!?