Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

The revolution will be supervised.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Second rate reporter says what?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Comic Relief Open Thread: Fear of A Black… Mermaid?

Late Night Comic Relief Open Thread: Fear of A Black… Mermaid?

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So Disney is doing a live remake of their relentlessly upbeat version of the Little Mermaid, whatever, it’s not as though I’m the target market here…


Lady who has some experience with toxic fans:

Imagine the grifting crowd-funding opportunities! If only we could be sure they’d stay in their AI bubble…

Reader Interactions

151Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Just got off the phone with customer service at Amazon. Took some deft footwork to get through the maze to talk with a human being but succeeded. Person on the other end couldn’t have been more patient and helpful regarding a curious dilemma encountered online involving returning an unusable, totally broken upon arrival electronic product I had shipped to Mom’s address in NY when was there because Amazon does not ship this particular thing to Hawaii (also with processing the refund). All has been resolved satisfactorily.

  5. 5.

    Citizen Alan

    Not gonna lie–I’m not a fan of The Little Mermaid no matter what the ethnicity of the lead actress is. I mean, the music is catchy, but for the most part, it’s the story of a teenaged girl who impulsively turns her back on her family, her home, and her entire culture to go chasing after that really cute guy she met for less than 5 minutes. Basically, it’s cartoon Twilight, except that there’s talking fish and it’s a musical. Also, the villain is coded like an Evil Drag Queen.

  6. 6.

    Anotherlurker

    I believe that the scumbag mouthpiece expounding his vast knowledge of Marine Biology is Matt Walsh, who I never heard of, until today.

    Yes, Matt is correct in that many marine organisms are transparent or translucent.  However his knowledge is either very shallow or nonexistent .

    The deep sea is home to many creatures who have worked on and perfected the art of camouflage as a key to successful living in the Ocean.  From bright Red Snappers and Rockfish to jet black Deep sea Anglerfish all have found a pattern and execution that is key to their species survival.

    And don’t even get me started on countershading!

    I guess my point is that there are many ways to approach a problem. There is collective strength in diversity.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    More than old enough to remember the foofaraw raised when the captain of Voyager was cast with a lady.

    ;)

  10. 10.

    mrmoshpotato

    Too all the racist haters about a half fish:

    1. You fucking creepy, creepy, fish-fucking creeps.

    2. 🎶You get slapped with a bass, and you totally blow!🎶

  11. 11.

    West of the Rockies

    @NotMax:

    The white supremacists lost their shit when Hermione Granger was played by a black girl.  They probably pooped their britches when The Wiz came out with a black cast.  These people don’t change.

  13. 13.

    Citizen Alan

    @NotMax: IIRC. there was a villain song written for Aladdin called Humiliate The Boy, but execs that it was too dark (even by Disney villain standards) and would upset children.  There are YouTube videos of the composer singing it to proposed sketches of Aladdin being tormented by Jafar’s wishes.

  14. 14.

    Citizen Alan

    @mrmoshpotato:   If Tucker Carlson is to be believed, these a******* get sexually aroused by green M&Ms.  Why shouldn’t we expect the thought of fish fucking to get them excited?

  15. 15.

    Citizen Alan

    @West of the Rockies:  I didn’t really mind a black Hermione in cursed child.  I was rather annoyed by Rowling’s suggestion that Hermione could have always been black in the original inal books.  There is no way in hell that a black muggle born Hermione Granger would have needed Ron weasley to explain to her what the word mudblood meant.  It’s bad enough that Dean Thomas, who was explicitly a black character, was never asked his opinion on wizarding blood supremacy. Though I suppose he did better than Anthony Goldstein, the only canonically Jewish character who never had any spoken lines at all, let alone anything to say about the politics of Rowling’s 7 volume allegory about Nazism.

  16. 16.

    Danielx

    Best comment I’ve read so far was to the effect that slavers threw a lot of black people overboard, and now people are all shocked and shit about a black mermaid?

  21. 21.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I suppose a black Aral is a little curious since it’s based on a Danish story, but, come on, talking crabs.

    I wonder if there will be a choirs of singing crabs for Aral in this one?

  23. 23.

    JaySinWA

    It’s hard to recall any fish or marine mammals that are white other than Melville’s fictional whale. Even whitefish don’t have white skin.

  25. 25.

    bjacques

    Trying again with my nym spelled correctly this time. Please delete the other one!

     

    I love it when suspension of disbelief fails for these guys—and it’s almost always guys—when a fantasy character is Black and/or female. See Dr. Who.

     

    Since it’s open thread…do BJ’s crack legal team know the appointed Special Master, Judge Dearie, well enough to expect him to do the job professionally and with minimum fuss or delay? Meanwhile, was it really “pencils down” pending the appointment, or did the DOJ keep beavering away during all the legal wrangling? And how do we know the DOJ haven’t already finished their search  and their filings aren’t just legal cover for the evidence they’ll later submit in court? I’d think even one stolen secret document would be enough to make their case, and cataloguing the rest is to fix the classified filing system Trump and his people tried their best to break. I like to think the latter, and Judge Dearie looks at the DOJ’s work and says “yup; looks good” since they already separated out the attorney-client privilege docs during the seizure, and Trump’s team are heckin’ bamboozled again!

  26. 26.

    bjacques

    Trying again with my nym spelled correctly this time. Please delete the one in moderation!

     

    I love it when suspension of disbelief fails for these guys—and it’s almost always guys—when a fantasy character is Black and/or female. See Dr. Who.

     

    Since it’s open thread…do BJ’s crack legal team know the appointed Special Master, Judge Dearie, well enough to expect him to do the job professionally and with minimum fuss or delay? Meanwhile, was it really “pencils down” pending the appointment, or did the DOJ keep beavering away during all the legal wrangling? And how do we know the DOJ haven’t already finished their search  and their filings aren’t just legal cover for the evidence they’ll later submit in court? I’d think even one stolen secret document would be enough to make their case, and cataloguing the rest is to fix the classified filing system Trump and his people tried their best to break. I like to think the latter, and Judge Dearie looks at the DOJ’s work and says “yup; looks good” since they already separated out the attorney-client privilege docs during the seizure, and Trump’s team are heckin’ bamboozled again!

  27. 27.

    prostratedragon

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:  Andersen was a 19th century man who travelled all over Europe — hence not that culturally isolated. Also Copenhagen itself was not that far off the beaten path that he couldn’t have met many kinds of people.

  28. 28.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    Seanan McGuire actually did a fair bit of research into marine life forms for her novel Into the Drowning Deep. Her Twitter thread on this nonsense is both informative and Classic Seanan (i.e., nerdy, somewhat gruesome, and entertaining).

  29. 29.

    sab

    @JaySinWA: Great white sharks? They do exist. That doesn’t mean I am on the racist side of this debate.

    ETA Also too white people aren’t all that white. I am as white as can be, and yet I am covered in freckles.

  32. 32.

    Montanareddog

    @sab: There was a Peter Ustinov anecdote about being asked to fill  a visa form that included a box for the applicant’s color. He wrote pink.

  34. 34.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @sab: This white noise is the sound of bigots mourning the loss of when POC used to be “tokens”; outnumbered, one-dimensional and disposable.

  35. 35.

    sab

    @The Thin Black Duke: Yes

    ETA My high school class had six black students. My grand-daughter’s class at the same school was majority black. And no academic decline. But the arts programs are all vastly improved.

  36. 36.

    oatler

    Ursula LeGuin was famously pissed when adaptations of her Earthsea books showed white wizards when she had plainly written them as black.

  39. 39.

    Amir Khalid

    If anyone’s interested, today, Friday 16th September, is the 59th anniversary of Malaysia Day — the day that Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore joined together to form the Federation of Malaysia. This set off an undeclared war between Malaysia and Indonesia, which wanted all of Borneo for itself. The two-year war was referred to as Konfrontasi (the Confrontation). Which, come to think of it, is a word Putin might find useful if he decides to escalate his “special operation” in Ukraine but still not declare it a war.

  42. 42.

    sab

    @Amir Khalid: Would you be offended if I say that your flag looks like USA crossed with South Carolina? SC is hostile to muslims and yet has a crescent moon on their flag. Nitwits.

    USA shouldn’t have monopoly in red stripes since many other countries have them. Cheerful

    EtA Cheerful= optimistic.

  45. 45.

    eclare

    @sab:   Made me look.  It is kind of similar with the red and white stripes and quadrant of blue.  According to Google, the similarity was a coincidence.

  46. 46.

    Spanky

    Just for the record, you could pay me to care that the little mermaid was black, but you may not get your money’s worth.

  48. 48.

    Expat

    I suspect this is less about “protecting the children” than interfering with their father’s ichthyological masturbation fantasies.  “Mmm, white, underage mermaids are hot!  Black underage mermaids are an abomination and real boner-deflators!”

  49. 49.

    PST

    What truly offended me was making Ariel half rainbow trout to appease the LGBTQ+ crowd. Wokism run amok I say!

  51. 51.

    Amir Khalid

    @Brachiator:

    Singapore is the only state ever expelled from a federal nation. This happened on 8th August 1965, which means it was a Malaysian state for less than two years. The Republic of Singapore has been its own nation ever since.

  55. 55.

    J R in WV

    @Amir Khalid:

    Singapore is the only state ever expelled from a federal nation.

    This makes me very optimistic about Florida and Texas!!!  Thanks for the info, wonderful news regarding some of our more outre states!

    Good-bye you flaming asses!!!

  57. 57.

    satby

    Fun occurrence at the farmers market yesterday. A man came up to my booth and asked “are you satby?”  And that’s how I met occasional commenter Chumley and his delightful mom 🙋

    Any time anyone is in the neighborhood, please do stop by 😊

  61. 61.

    daveNYC

    I checked out the box office take of all the DIsney live action remakes and damn.  They might be creatively bankrupt but they bring in piles of cash.

  66. 66.

    satby

    @eclare: tbf, she used a different one after the aide took the leaking fountain pen away from her. It’s a funny clip, but everyone hates ink leaking all over their hands, so it doesn’t really make Charles look any more peevish than most of us would have been under the same circumstances.

    Bet that’s why the man who would be king used Sharpies.

  67. 67.

    germy shoemangler

    @satby:

    I remember the old James Thurber anecdote about his mother struggling with some household apparatus or another.  She finally yelled “Why doesn’t someone take this away from me??”

  69. 69.

    Kropacetic

    @daveNYC: The Jungle Book may have been better than the animated version. Pete’s Dragon was pretty much an entirely new story (that I found kind of boring).

    All the rest add little to the original animated story. I do like watching different productions of the same material just for the subtle changes and sometimes they can use that familiarity to play with your expectations.  Like I loved Beauty and the Beast on stage. These remakes are (mostly) not even interesting enough to sate that impulse.

  70. 70.

    Suzanne

    I mean, when I attempt to sing underwater, it sounds like BLOOOOOOOOORP. But they’re just here for the realism.

  72. 72.

    eclare

    @satby:   Hahaha…

    I found the clip funny, but also found his frustration understandable.  His mother just died, he has had a relentless schedule since then, and every bit of it covered by the media.  I am glad the media is not in my face…they would hear me curse for no real reason multiple times per day

    Unless you consider dropping a spoon on the floor a real reason.

  77. 77.

    rikyrah

    @Danielx:

    Found the tweet in a screenshot, because, of course, Twitter removed it because the racists got mad at its truth

    One Black British Woman’s Voice – Burner Acct (@OneBlackBritis5) tweeted at 4:24 AM on Fri, Sep 16, 2022:
    Honey we screenshot it and will be posting it EVERYWHERE. Hi racist @Twitter you only made this excellent tweet travel FURTHER. 😂😂😂😂😂 https://t.co/y0qN4ZwEfK
    (https://twitter.com/OneBlackBritis5/status/1570705053463506944?s=02)

  79. 79.

    germy shoemangler

    @prostratedragon:

    I read all of his stuff when I was a teenager.

    Now that I’m in my 60s I find stuff I didn’t appreciate back then.

     

    “The sharp edges of old reticences are softened in the autobiographer by the passing of time – a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago, but the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment. Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress and the careful ordering of event so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition of what, exactly, was the matter.”
    ― James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

  81. 81.

    Kropacetic

    @rikyrah: A group of my friends is planning on seeing this as soon as it’s in theatres. Not even out of interest in the movie,  just as a response to the horrible racist reactions the trailer got.

    Jesus Christ, white people got basically every character for decades and they can’t abide not continuing to do so as every(!) single(!) one of these movies gets remade.

  82. 82.

    satby

    @eclare: Unless you consider dropping a spoon on the floor a real reason.

    Not only do I consider it a real, legitimate reason for swearing; that curse will be followed by a moment of silence whilst I consider just how badly I really want that spoon instead of another one from the drawer.

  86. 86.

    LiminalOwl

    @Citizen Alan: YES. Also, the original story has no happy ending (sorry, I’ve never seen either Disneyfied version, because the HCA story traumatized me in childhood). She doesn’t get the guy, and she walks on knives for the rest of her life while having to be happy for him and his bride.

  87. 87.

    Matt McIrvin

    I do feel sometimes that by getting the worst people in the world riled up over “progressive” changes, Disney is playing us to promote their uninvolving retread material. It’s kind of like the John Goodman character in “Matinee” (based on William Castle) ginning up a moral panic over his cheeseball monster movie for publicity.

    I follow theme-park fandom and the same thing is happening there–just about everything Disney is doing right now to turn their parks into overpriced elite playgrounds with elaborate systems of paywalls on top of paywalls is kind of appalling, but every discussion of it gets derailed sooner or later by some chud going on about the child-groomers of “Woke Disney”, which is 100% not the problem.

  89. 89.

    LiminalOwl

    @Danielx: My spouse read your comment to me (before I’d waked enough to be reading for myself), and YES. Now I want fanfic about the women who jumped overboard to avoid rape in the Middle Passage, but were rescued by mermen and transformed, living to become the progenitors of generations of Ariels.

  90. 90.

    Suzanne

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I do feel sometimes that by getting the worst people in the world riled up over “progressive” changes, Disney is playing us to promote their uninvolving retread material. 

    That’s how I felt about “The Interview”…. like, I have to watch this terrible Seth Rogen movie to show my support for free speech and opposition to North Korea?

    I didn’t watch it.

  91. 91.

    Baud

    I’m looking forward to Disney’s next libe action movie, featuring a black Snow White.

    The racists will go nuclear.

  93. 93.

    Eyeroller

    In the version of the story I learned, the Little Mermaid gives up her ability to survive in the water (and her fish tail) in order to become a “human,” then when she is rejected by the Prince she walks into the ocean and drowns herself.

    It’s ridiculous even to address this kind of argument, but why would a mermaid live in the deep sea?  Is that where the original animated version had her living?  (Never saw it.)

  94. 94.

    prostratedragon

    @germy shoemangler:  I remember having read that one, but sounds like I should revisit soon. Somehow I got hold of Thurber Carnival, also in high school, and read the whole thing, as well as any other stray Thurber I could find.

  95. 95.

    Anonymous At Work

    Gotta commend the people who think they can make and then distribute a whitewashed version of a Disney film.  The House of the Mouse don’t play and it has the army of litigators to back that up.  Going up against them is on par with but actually dumber than a demolition derby against the US Army.

  96. 96.

    Tony G

    Politics and racism aside — WTF is this obsession with Disney among (allegedly) grown-up adults?  About 20 years ago I had an IT co-worker (a guy, unmarried, about 40 years old, intelligent enough to work competently, a decent enough fellow on an everyday basis) who was just obsessed with Disney cartoons,  Disney theme parks, etc.  A nice enough guy, but WTF?  Add racism to a guy like that, and you get grown “men” obsessing about the skin color of a fictional creature in a bowdlerized version of a fairy tale.

  97. 97.

    Tony G

    @Anonymous At Work: Well, actually, I’ve read some of the drivel from the lunatics who say they are ready (any day now!) to start the next Civil War to save the “white race”.  They actually claim to believe that a handful of out-of-shape goobers with AR-15 are ready to take on the U.S. Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines.  Not the smartest people.

  99. 99.

    randy khan

    The science guy, besides attempting to impose science on a movie about mermaids, also doesn’t seem to understand the real life science at all.  Or, at a minimum, he hasn’t noticed that plenty of undersea creatures have dark coloration.

  101. 101.

    Soprano2

    @eclare: It seems to be true that no one has even thought about him mourning his mother’s death. I think that life would be horrible, like living in a gilded cage posted in the middle of the town square where everyone can see everything you do, and feels free to criticize all of it. Who among us could stay sane in such a situation? I know it’s not all the time, but imagine that if every time you were in public people were following your every move and listening to your every word. It would be exceedingly unpleasant

    The week after my sister died was extremely public because she and her boyfriend were prominent business owners in Springfield. Just imagine, your sister just died in a shocking plane crash and a member of the press is calling to ask you about her. I hated how public it was, I can’t imagine living like that all the time.

  103. 103.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: I’m never been that fond of Disney’s house style, but I appreciate the level of slickness on which they operate. I never visited any of their theme parks until I was an adult with a family of my own, but going there made me appreciate what they mean when they go on about “magic”–it’s magic in the stage-conjuring sense, like walking into an elaborately constructed illusion, and that’s interesting in itself. And they’ve always tried skewing some of it so that there’s some spectacle there that adults can enjoy.

    It’s not necessarily interesting enough to support how expensive it’s gotten lately, though. And they seem to be cutting a lot of corners on the actual experience, in a way they didn’t back in the day. They’ll blow a lot of money on one technologically groundbreaking element of an attraction and skimp on all the little details–and that’s getting away from what made them interesting in the first place. Meanwhile, other operators like Universal are threatening to eat their lunch.

  104. 104.

    dnfree

    These are the same people who claim, online, whenever there’s an article about early female programmers, that they weren’t really programmers or analysts, they just coded what men told them to code.  The fact that I was programming in the 60s, the “Hidden Figures” women were programming, and others well before that time were programming—does not compute.  Couldn’t have happened.  Such a strange mindset.

  105. 105.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: There’s a segment of the radical/Marxist left who believe the same thing, who are actually into Second Amendment gun-nuttery because they believe that’s how the working class are going to seize the means of production. Which is even more pathetic to me–on top of the right-wing fantasies they’ve got a belief that they’re going to persuade a bunch of MAGA toads to turn Communist.

  106. 106.

    dnfree

    @prostratedragon: To this day I can’t read “The Night the Bed Fell on Father” without laughing as he mishaps pile up.  But when it was written, you could still imagine a grandfather who was a civil war veteran living upstairs.

  109. 109.

    Tony G

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Yeah, maybe they believe that.  Almost half of the U.S. military personnel now is either Black or Hispanic.  Maybe they’re getting their information from 75-year-old John Wayne movies.

  110. 110.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: You definitely see it in online chatter involving the kind of leftists who spend most of their time complaining about the shitlibs–gun control is one of the shitlib distractions from class war. Some of these people may be fake leftists, of course.

  111. 111.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: If we have a real civil war I suspect we’ll see a MAGA revolt within the military from some deranged General Flynn types and people who got heavily indoctrinated into white religious fundamentalism at the academies. But it’d be more like a schism.

  112. 112.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I never went to the theme parks as a kid (my family didn’t have the money).  I have been to Tokyo Disneyland (while visiting my wife’s family there) a few times when my kids were little.  That was a pretty wacky experience — all of the animatronic characters speaking Japanese, and broiled squid at the snack stands.  Interesting experience, but not one that I plan to do again!

  113. 113.

    Tony G

    @dnfree: “coded what men told them to code”. That, basically, is the definition of a software coder.  Some man (or woman) gives you a specification and you figure out how to code it in a computer language into a working system.  My theory is the men didn’t start to become coders until some point (probably the late sixties) when the pay became higher.  Before that it was “women’s work”.  The same way that nursing continues to be largely “women’s work” because the pay and working conditions are so crummy.

  114. 114.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: The Tokyo resort is actually often described as the best one, and it’s because it’s not owned by Disney–Disney operates and designs it under license, but it’s owned by a deep-pocketed Japanese development company that is willing to spend BIG, bigger than Disney is. So the budget cuts that happen in between the blue-sky design and the realization at all the other parks often don’t happen there. But the one everyone raves about is the second park, “Tokyo DisneySea”.

  116. 116.

    Frankensteinbeck

    THIS THREAD HAD BETTER NOT BE DEAD THIS IS FINALLY MY MOMENT.

    I have read a lot of HCA.  Nobody else has and it’s REALLY OBVIOUS every time shit like this comes up.

    The Prince lives in an orientalist, slave-owning fantasy kingdom that is very definitely not Denmark.  He is almost certainly not white.  The unnamed mermaid was his personal slave.  She could be any color.  Andersen wouldn’t care, he thought this stuff was exotic and cool.

    By the way, the relationship was incredibly messed up.  She’s his slave.  Her official sleeping spot is the floor outside his bedroom door.  There is a scene where she’s sitting on his lap and they’re kissing, and he tells he how he A) thinks of her as a child, B) wants to marry her, C) can’t because she looks almost exactly like the woman he wants even more to marry.  Andersen was fucked up.

    Also most of his writing was incredibly tedious.  Or depressing.  ‘The Little Match Girl’ was his typical story, about how life sucks but going to heaven after your tragic, meaningless death is great.  So be sure to pray a lot.  But premarital sex, totally cool, go for it.

    @Baud:

    I don’t remember a specific description, but I’d lay odds she’s not wearing a clam bikini top as a mermaid.  Andersen was fond of naked characters.  Especially children.  Andersen was CREEPY.

    @LiminalOwl:

    But it does have a happy ending!  When the Prince marries that nun who looks like the mermaid, the mermaid is given a chance to murder the couple while they’re asleep after their day-before-wedding sex!  And if she does she’ll be a mermaid again!  But when she doesn’t, she wins the REAL prize, turning into an air spirit that has a chance of earning an immortal soul and going to heaven.

    That story is SO.  WEIRD.

     

    Tl;dr – Everyone go read Snow Queen, it has zero resemblance to Frozen but it’s Andersen’s best story by far.

  117. 117.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Yeah, that could happen.  But 99.99% of these guys are fat, lazy cowards who would be reluctant to get up from their armchairs.  A lot of talk, but not much else.  Even Timothy McVeigh, almost 30 years ago, made sure that his personal ass was safe when he killed all those people in Oklahoma City.

  118. 118.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: Yep, software development was considered a low-level clerical job back then, like being in the typist pool–because the mostly women “computers” who became the first professional programmers had been treated that way too. But what they actually did was the same thing modern software developers do (backwards and in heels, so to speak, because the tech was so primitive; everything was much harder)–it just didn’t have the same social status.

  119. 119.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Interesting.  But I have to confess, I remember my visits to Tokyo Disneyland as an ordeal that I went through “to make the kids happy”.  Waiting on line for 30 minutes in the heat and humidity before getting on a two-minute ride.  I was glad when the boys grew out of that!

  120. 120.

    JaneE

    These people pretend to care about the color of a cartoon character who is only half human?  And the guy who thinks putting black skin on someone from the ocean is unscientific?  Maybe this particular mermaid is half orca.  Not a fish, but a better other half from a presumed mammal.

    Way way too much time on their hands.  Maybe they should get a real job that takes up some of their time.

  121. 121.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: Kind of like the way “Aladdin” was added to the Arabian Nights by a French translator, who claimed he heard it from a Syrian, and the story is set in… China, where “China” basically means “a place far away from here where magical weird shit happens”. The “Chinese” setting gets referenced in the British panto version.

  122. 122.

    JAFD

    Happy Malaysia Day, Amir !
    And happy Hildegarde von Bingen’s birthday, for the jackal-medievalists. And happy Mexican Independence Day.

  123. 123.

    Tony G

    @Frankensteinbeck: Yeah.  The original versions of fairy tales that I’ve read (and even the Hans Christian Anderson versions) are generally pretty dark and violent and tragic.  The Disney versions were cleaned up for middle class suburbanites.  So, what Disney is doing makes perfect sense from a business perspective.  They’re tweaking their bowdlerized fantasies to appeal to an increasing number of non-white customers.  It’s similar to the Black Barbie dolls that began to be sold 45 years ago.  The people who complain about this are complaining about the fact that the U.S. will soon no longer be a majority white nation.

  125. 125.

    JaneE

    @dnfree: In the 70’s I worked for a small division of a big corp.  The big brother division had coders.  They were titled programmers, but they coded what the analyst put on the flowchart that was part of the specification.  Exactly, logical mistakes and all.  That was their job, and coloring outside the lines was not allowed.  Coders were primarily men, because everyone in Data Processing (as it was called) were men.

    In our division we didn’t have enough people for that kind of division of labor, but for almost 5 years I was the only female in the department.  Our title was programmer analyst and we basically did everything from initial contact with the users through hand-off to operations when it went production.

    We got one of their coders during one of their layoffs, and everyone including him was surprised by how much he did not know.  After one set to over him allowing a program to go into production when he knew about the error the user complained of on the first run, but had not corrected it because the flowchart was written that way (by a fledgling analyst who came from budgets and wrote the flowchart as a learning exercise) he was so excited that he could learn anything and everything and apply it and talk directly with the people who would be using the outputs of his program it was just amazing.  While we were chewing him out over his error going into production one of his responses was “you mean I am allowed to do that”, and when our response was ” you are not only allowed, you are required to do that” his whole face just lit up for joy.   He was only with us for little over a year, and then his original company wanted him back because they were rehiring.  We had improved his skill set so much they had to promote him two positions in their setup just to make decent use of his knowledge and experience.   We didn’t want to lose him but that was an offer too good to pass up.

    There may have been some coders who only wanted to code, but I never met one.

  126. 126.

    dnfree

    @Tony G: I understand that theory.  But the female programmers of the 1950s and 1960s were doing the same work the males were.  If a physicist gave any one of the programming staff at my first job an equation and told them to make it into a program, the task was the same.

    When I got into business programming, systems analysis was almost built in.  You’d be told to go observe how this group of accountants or whatever did a process, and computerize it for them.  No other specs—you created the specs and the programs and the users told you when you had it right.  Males and females in the same job description (which was often just “programmer” in the 1960s) were  doing the same function.  It wasn’t men telling women specifically what to code.

  128. 128.

    Ruckus

    @Anotherlurker:

    “There is collective strength in diversity.”

    Repeated for absolute truth.

    How boring it would be if we looked in the mirror or walked down the street and only ever saw the exact same picture? How would you tell the animals one from another? How would you know if it’s the dog that likes nothing more than a little attention or the one that likes to chew off legs? Boring conservative assholes want everything to be the same, but same as what or who?

  130. 130.

    dnfree

    @JaneE: Excellent explanation.  I’ll tell you a sad but funny story.  My first job right out of college was at a national lab, because I had a physics minor and minimal programming training in FORTRAN.  Programmers were in demand even though we didn’t have the level of training that came along in just a few years.

    One day in the cafeteria I met a young man who had been hired  at the same time I was.  His qualifications were better than mine, and yet I was a programmer and he was stuck in computer operations swapping tapes etc. on a big mainframe.  He asked enviously why I had gotten the programming job and he hadn’t.  Turned out that the operations manager would not hire a woman to run that very expensive equipment.  Soon that case my gender turned out to get me a job I was less qualified for than a male applicant.

    sadly, the process you describe for coding seems to be back in force when I talk to former coworkers.  They write detailed specs, which are sent to India, and when the code comes back, they can’t touch it.  If there’s any flaw, no matter how small, whether because of their design or the coder’s implementation, it must be written up and sent back to India to fix.  The process is laborious and not much fun, as I define fun.  Not much sense of ownership.  And it does happen on occasion that partway through implementation and coding, something comes up that changes the entire way you were approaching the project.

  134. 134.

    Tony G

    @dnfree: Absolutely.  To the degree that women programmers got less pay and fewer promotion opportunities, it was sexism, pure and simple, just like in other fields.  My experience (1977-2017) in the field was similar to yours.  Detailed specifications were rare and accurate specifications were very rare.  In reality, every programmer was also a business analyst, systems analyst and project planner.  By the time I got into the field, women in the field were common but most of the staff were men, and (I think) that the pay was about equal.  I can’t speak for the first couple of decades though.  Most likely the women were treated like not-so-glorified secretaries.  My mother had worked as a secretary in the forties and fifties and she would always say that the secretaries ran the place for the clueless bosses, at much lower pay.

  135. 135.

    RaflW

    To that last tweet by Popehat, I believe he is describing the Meta digital space. Which no sensible person wants to hang out in. But I repeat myself.

  136. 136.

    RaflW

    Pardon me for noticing, but don’t mermaids hang out on rocks and sun themselves? The idea that a mermaid couldn’t be black because there’s no need for melanin under the sea just totally ignores the amphibian nature of these mythical creatures.

    (Also, too, if the idea of mermaids had been dreamed up in the Niger river delta rather than in, what, Copenhagen or something, then yeah mermaids woulda been black from the beginning).

  138. 138.

    Tony G

    @HumboldtBlue: When my boys were little we had a tradition of renting and watching Mad Mad Mad World once a year.  They particularly liked the scene where Jonathan Winters trashed the gas station.

  140. 140.

    Tony G

    @dnfree: When I was a “contract worker” at IBM about ten years ago, they had a similar system, but perhaps more extreme.  A project would be divided into many pieces, and each piece would be assigned to people in a different low-wage country (in most of which English was not the primary language).  Each person did his or her own piece, with no responsibility for or detailed knowledge of what was being done elsewhere.  Taylorism at its worst.  Somebody must have convinced upper management that the company would save money that way.  Nobody was responsible for the success of the whole project.  The system, needless to say, worked terribly, but when things inevitably went south, finger-pointing would ensue to attempt to deflect blame to others.  Inevitably, at the end of every quarter, several people would be laid off as sacrificial lambs.  I always think of that when I hear politicians talking about “running government like a business”.

  143. 143.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Sheesh. Some of you are as bad as the neck beards.

    * Disney did this version for the simple reason that Black folks money is as green as white folks. (Considering the history, this is progress)

    * The real white washing is Aral almost certainly caused the ship wreck. Were you see a ship full of horny, annoying sailors, a mermaid sees home delivery for dinner.

    * If Disney was “woke” they would have done a similar story from African folklore and not this lazy assed, color pallet swap.

    Otherwise, this is just a nautical version of Twilight, except this time around its the female protagonist who falls in love with her lunch.

  144. 144.

    dnfree

    @Tony G: thank you for sharing!  Yes, it seems this theory started around ten years ago, when I retired. With the “old” system, sometimes the analysts and programmers understood the running of the business as well or better than managers. They also knew how to integrate the new with the existing.

    The last company I worked for converted from a custom-built system to SAP with “modifications”. They lost a lot of customized code for specialized functions that SAP had no equivalent for.

  146. 146.

    Tony G

    @dnfree: Oh yeah, SAP.  The last place I worked (five years ago) they were planning to replace mountains of custom code with SAP plus modifications.  The only problem was that most of the people who understood the custom code had either been laid off or retired, and for decades management had not made system documentation a priority.  I don’t know how that conversion project went.  Not well, I suspect.

  149. 149.

    dnfree

    @Tony G: I used to have a collection of articles of SAP disasters.  And there was a brief movement to train existing staff in ABAP, the SAP programming language, which was such a kluge of accretions and backward compatibility that I said I’d rather retire than do that.  Worst language I ever saw.  Well, in competition with C probably.  But then they decided to send coding to India anyway.  Saves money.

    That company had such an extensive system for deciding which freight carrier to use based on size of load, source and destination of shipment, and a bunch of other factors.  Saved them a lot of money and time.  SAP didn’t really have anything even close, or even the concept of needing something like that.

  150. 150.

    dnfree

    @Frankensteinbeck: just so you know, I read your explanation and I agree.  Good source of ideas for stories, but not his version of stories.  The little match girl one creeped me out as a child.  All the versions of the little mermaid, including Disney, creep me out.

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