Posts by Craig Ranapia
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
To be fair to Senator Cruz, if you're going to get into a tone-deaf douche-off you will be Trumped:
“When you look at Paris, toughest gun laws in the world, nobody had guns but the bad guys,” the Republican presidential candidate said during an appearance in Texas, in remarks broadcast by CNN. “Nobody had guns. And they were just shooting them one by one, and then they broke in and had a big shootout and ultimately killed the terrorists.”
“And I will tell you what—you can say what you want, if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would have been a much, much different situation,” Trump added.
OK, you expect the guy who had no idea China isn't party to the TPP to have a clue that France's gun regulations are far from the "toughest in the world". (Instead what France does have is a pretty sensible and rigorously enforced licensing regime, and doesn't recognize some inalienable human right for civilians to possess military-grade automatic weapons.)
But perhaps he'd keep his Dirty Harry fantasies to himself, speaking in a country where there's been a string of high profile gun violence in movie theaters -- the most recent a little over three months ago.
-
While victims were still lying where they fell, US Republican presidential aspirant Ted Cruz responded by rejecting ”outreach or declarations of tolerance” in favour of airstrikes with more “tolerance for civilian casualties”.
I know it's never going to happen, but I'd love to see Hollande and Angela Merkel (who's far too nice to refugees for the American right's liking) to hold a joint press conference and say something like this:
"When we want the advice of American politicians on our gun regulations, policies towards migrants or, basically, anything else? We will ask for it. But we strongly recommend not holding your breath until then."
-
Polity: An Orwellian Alice in Wonderland, in reply to Russell Brown,
I had a bizarre Twitter conversation yesterday with a guy who was insistent that John Key wants to keep the bad men in Australia and Labour want to bring them here. No amount of explanation, linked stories etc would dissuade him from this understanding.
What makes it particularly bizarre is that precisely nobody worth paying any mind to is arguing Australia doesn't have the right to deport people. That's so self-evidently absurd, it's not worth dignifying. What a lot of people have perfectly reasonable issues with is... you know... detaining people without prompt and timely trial, and over a year ago people were saying before it was passed that the Section 501 "character" grounds were broad and vague, the Minister had excessive discretion without proper oversight, and it would destroy lives and families without any genuine security or social benefit for Australia,
-
Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
In an interesting synchronicity, the second volume of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher is waiting for me at the library.
-
Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Deborah,
Perhaps relevant to this, Variety’s new television writer Maureen Ryan has done a depressingly excellent (but avoid the comments at all costs) feature on American TV’s gaping diversity deficit for directors, with links to a lot of the interviews she did for the piece.
Particularly interesting is this Q&A with Empire showrunner lene Chaiken:
Most of “Empire’s” directors were African-American and female in season 1. Can you talk about how you got there? Because “Empire’s” stats are basically the opposite of how most shows’ stats look.
First it starts with the premise and the will to do it, because it’s not a given. When you start with the premise that 30 percent is the leftovers — the leftover [diversity] slots — that’s not a good place to start. I start in the other place. And “Empire” is unique. [The director roster began from] my worldview and my approach to staffing anything that I’ve done, but also [co-creator] Lee Daniels made it very clear how important it was for him that most of the episodic directors on “Empire” are African-American. So that was our starting premise. “We need to find the best black directors who do episodic television and staff this show primarily with those directors.”
As we were mounting the show in the first season, [co-creator] Danny Strong said to me, it’s really, really important to him that we staff as many women directors as we can. It’s also really important to me. So clearly there are fewer black directors and fewer women directors than there are white guys, but they certainly are out there. It’s always the case that the really good directors that we want for our shows are very busy, and certainly since there are fewer black directors and fewer women directors [since many shows] have a wish to diversify, those directors do get booked very, very quickly. But we just made sure to get out there and find the best directors that were right for the show and book them.
Did you look at people who were already in the DGA, or did you cast your net more widely than that? How did you actually get those people onto your radar?
Some were already on my radar, but I also talked to people, largely people on my writing staff, who had worked on other shows. Also the studio and the network recommended people. Francie Calfo at Imagine recommended people. We made a deep list. We made sure that we were aware of everybody that would be right for the show and exciting for the show. And we went to great effort to make sure that we had all of those people on our radar.
Please note this has nothing to do with “tokenism” or lowering any bars. Lee Daniels and John Singleton are both Oscar-nominated directors. Sanaa Hamri, Rosemary Rodriguez and Debbie Allen have extensive feature, television and music video/advertising experience. If a white woman like Chaiken can make a bloody effort (on a show that’s a huge critical and ratings success, no less), nobody else has any excuses left.
And not just in America. Call The Midwife make a conscious effort to at least have gender-balance – or even a majority of women directors, and a majority of women on the writing staff. Creator/co-producer Heidi Thomas makes no bones about saying that was no accident.
You know what? If shows like Empire and Call The Midiwife are expanding pop culture beyond "straight white middle-aged middle-class men talking to and about themselves," then I thoroughly approve of whatever "quotas" get it done.
-
Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Emma Hart,
That's how it functions, both in the Green Party, and Trudeau's cabinet. It's not 'there must be at least X% of women', it's 'there must be at least X% of women, and of men'.
Which the over-excitable "oy noes, the end of meritocracy" Canadian punditry tended to forget. It wasn't 50% women, 50% cronut.
-
It didn’t help that the Herald’s “Super City reporter”, Bernard Orsman, has pursued what seems like a personal vendetta against Brown.
Seems? I really don't think Orsman and The Herald's obsession with holding Len Brown personally responsible for everything from heavy rain to traffic jams could have any more obvious. And it just got worse after their failed campaign to slut-shame his penis out of office -- it was embarrassing watching an allegedly serious newspaper keep doubling down on that to the point of absurdity. How many "Len Brown's a coward for not going somewhere one person said he's not welcome anyway" columns did Orsman and Rudman run between them?
-
The concern-trolling argument is that if we had quotas for women, people would think that women hadn’t achieved their positions through merit, but only to fill the quota.
As I snark-tweeted at the time, I'm sure the fifteen women with ministerial warrants in Canada were appointed entirely on merit. The sixteen men (if you include the Prime Minister)? Quite another question. :)
I (quite rightly) got a long string of blistering and perfectly accurate replies about how brilliantly qualified every man jack of them was, and how dare I suggest otherwise?
Which, of course, was exactly my point.
Oh, and another somewhat disingenuous nuance to this concern trolling? One the most naive political observer would pretend that Cabinets are strict meritocracies -- political debts get paid off, factional interests mollified or put in their place and on and on. FFS, just read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. After the 1860 election, his appointments to Treasury, the State Department and Attorney-General were three men he beat in a race for the nomination that was bare-knuckled even by the standards of American politics. It worked, more or less, because it had to but nobody could pretend "merit" was the only thing on Lincoln's mind.
At least Trudeau was upfront about what he was going to do well before the election.
-
If the production is a litte uneven in places, the essence of this record, with its sparkling, earnest, urgent, slightly-overthought guitar pop songs, is pure Martin. It’s as if he’s woken from a long dream, and it’s good to have him back.
It is, especially when it seemed like there was an awfully long stretch where everything that could go wrong for the poor bugger did, spectacularly. Even if its not technically flawless, it must be wonder to just get a substantial piece of work finished and out there.
-
Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP, in reply to Emma Hart,
So a whole bunch of my best friends are lefty Canadians. What they want is 'shot of Stephen Harper'. I've never heard any of them mention the opposition parties.
It never hurts if your opponents are about as palatable as a pork sausage in a kosher deli, but it also didn't do any harm that the Liberals and NDP said what they meant, meant what they said, and did it consistently and clearly. Then again, I might be dramatically under-thinking it.