SoylentNews

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious letter in the snail mail purporting to be from a certain PC Plod of Her Majesty's Constabulary informing me in somewhat stilted and ungrammatical English (Mrs Turgid teaches English at a secondary school and was highly amused) that he would like to speak to me regarding a inappropriate comment made on a UK web forum from an IP address apparently registered in my name. The method of communication requested was quite strange. PC Plod wanted to know my phone number so that he could speak to me in person. PC Plod managed to find my snail mail address, so this was a bit fishy, to say the least.

Smelling a rat, I decided to proceed with caution and to entertain the possibility that this may have been some kind of hoax.

Being a bit of a commie I'm a member of a trade union and have access to free lawyers, so I contacted them. I was granted a telephone conversation with a lawyer who was both very helpful and knowledgeable. I am not a lawyer, and what follows in not legal advice. I am paraphrasing from a conversation that happened many weeks ago.

The lawyer agreed that the wording of the letter was very strange. I made the point that I was quite distressed by it since I am not in the habit of intentionally stirring up trouble, certainly not of a violent kind and certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the police. She conjectured that if it wasn't a hoax, perhaps the police had imagined that someone using my network may have said something contravening the Malicious Communications Act. We both discussed that fact that a lot of subjectivity is involved when trying to argue that something is in breach of the Act and that this has implications for Free Speech. To put it a bit more bluntly, just because PC Plod takes issue with something that doesn't mean that a Court of Law would. It would be expensive and time-consuming for them to prove so. And we are still innocent until proven guilty in England and Wales.

She discussed the circumstances under which a police officer may speak to a member of the public. If a police officer has reason to speak to you regarding a suspected crime or such, you should be interviewed under caution and have the right to legal representation. What you discuss will be written down and signed. If the police officer wishes to speak to you in connection with a civil matter, they have no business doing so. They should not be investigating. Lawyers deal directly with that sort of thing. Finally, apparently, a police officer may wish to speak to you unofficially to offer "a few friendly words of advice." Communicating with the police by phone is a bad idea since you have no idea who you are really speaking to at the other end. You also have no idea whether the call is being recorded, whether there are other people listening in, or whether it is being transcribed.

So a letter was written back to this mysterious PC Plod expressing surprise, concern and asking for more information.

Eventually came the reply. PC Plod glibly and arrogantly stated that a message posted from somewhere behind my router broke Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act but that he had no idea who posted it. Upon looking at the pseudonym under which the message was posted, I suspected satire. The name suggested a certain amount of reactionary bad temper and perhaps a degree of non-conformity perhaps relating to ethnicity, the sort of thing that your typical alt-wrong snowflake would have difficulty with. Looking at the actual message and the discussion under which it was posted, it was patently obvious that it was satire, highly condensed, but in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The problem is, apart from the fact that PC Plod is poorly educated, not particularly familiar with the political culture of his own country, has no concept of context, but this particular forum has a major design flaw in that moderators may remove comments, thereby removing any context in which other comments may have been made.

PC Plod did indeed offer some friendly advice on Internet security and signed of with a thinly-veiled threat.

Let me just finish by pointing out that this "grossly offensive" comment was pretty tame compared with the stuff EthanolFueled and TheMightyBuzzard and even Runaway1956 post sometimes around here.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

Here's one. Suppose you were a Three Letter Agency and you needed to break some strong encryption. Now say that the cost of the hardware to do that was prohibitive (it's not likely to be invented for several decades, for example) but you remembered that millions of people were running "grid computing" (remember that term) applications on their home computers with juicy GPUs (e.g. Folding@Home). Do you reckon you could get some secret code deployed by those projects to help you break that encryption in parallel right under the noses of J. Random Citizen?

No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.

Woman In Saudi Arabia Arrested For Wearing Skirt, Crop Top In Video

5 Injured In Series Of Acid Attacks In London

The Evening Standard newspaper reports that nearly 1,500 acid attacks were reported in London in the past six years.

Hong Kong's High Court Expels Pro-Democracy Lawmakers

Man-Repelling Flamethrowers Are Being Marketed to Women in China

Although it's unclear if women in China are actually using these mini flamethrowers, they're not the most bizarre product aimed at keeping aggressive men away. That honor goes to the "anti-pervert" leggings that apparently give women's legs a hairier look and made the rounds on Chinese blogs in 2013.

That could attract a worse variety of pervert.

My inbox is full of recruiter spam... uhh... "inquiries" every single one marked Urgent, they all want an Android Graphic Debug engineer in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The only Hillsboro company that does Android Platform Development is Intel.

I expect their graphics are all fucked up.

It's quite likely they will only hire a contractor for this. Intel uses a lot of contract programmers.

Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation (archive.is)

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.

Emphasis mine.

Quentin Tarantino Met With Margot Robbie For Sharon Tate: Sources

Word has gotten out that Quentin Tarantino’s next film will be a drama revolving around the Manson Family murders. Deadline has heard that Tarantino met with Margot Robbie to potentially play Sharon Tate, the actress wife of director Roman Polanski who was slain in 1969 in a brutal murder whose savagery shocked the country.

How Kim Kardashian’s Lesser Siblings Are Sullying Her Brand

Every Kardashian is a snowflake: beautiful, unique, and with her own distinctive brand of merchandise. Kim is the sexy one and the famous one. Khloé is the funny one. Kourtney is the healthy one/the super mom. Rob is the boy. As soon as they graduated from puberty/fake high school, Kendall and Kylie Jenner took on their own roles in the family business, garnishing their half-siblings’ reality TV show empire with their own special flair (aka black fashion trends they found on Instagram). Kylie had big lips and a rapper boyfriend, and Kendall was a real model. Kylie wore long acrylic nails and Kendall had sleep paralysis. Kylie realized lots of things and Kendall appeared to realize absolutely nothing. With the addition of the Jenner sisters, the Kardashian brand became stronger and more inescapable than ever. This updated cast promised an era of Kardashian success and stasis: sisters and half-sisters prattling on over grilled chicken salads season after season, getting married, giving birth, growing older, customizing and re-customizing their Mercedes just to feel something.

And then 2017 hit Calabasas like a meteor, leaving a trail of escalating controversies and some abandoned Dash merchandise in its wake.

To put things into perspective, just last summer the Kardashians were celebrating the demise of family nemesis Taylor Swift, who was effectively outed for her serpentine tendencies on Kim Kardashian’s Snapchat. Following Kim’s Pulitzer-worthy work, Swift was relegated to her own ninth circle of hell: anonymity. Swift was squad-less and single and Kim Kardashian was more famous than ever, essentially dancing on her enemy’s grave in a pair of priceless custom Yeezys. Now, less than a year later, the entire Kardashian family appears to be teetering on the brink of overexposure, just like TayTay. This is the way the Kardashian world ends: not with a bang, but a potent combination of cultural appropriation scandals, Instagram revenge porn, a really bad Pepsi ad, and desecrating the memory of Tupac Shakur.

It’s hard to say if the Kardashians have been sabotaged by their lesser siblings, or are merely reaping the rewards of their own shitty seeds. After all, the main gripe that socially conscious consumers appear to have with the Kardashians is their cultural appropriation—and while these accusations have certainly escalated, taking trend cues from women of color has always been an integral part of the Kardashian brand. When Kim Kardashian was, incorrectly and ahistorically, heralded for singlehandedly making hips and butts sexy, she arguably set her family on the path to their own destruction. Ever since, the Kardashians have consistently co-opted black trends, aesthetics, and styles—everything from cornrows to, allegedly, the n-word. Sure, there’s a difference between braiding your hair a certain way because you saw a black woman doing it on Tumblr and putting your face on top of Biggie Smalls’. Then again, when you build an entire brand off of your ability to spot and repackage trends, the line between curation and harmful co-option is predictably thin. And when you’re Kylie Jenner, a 19-year-old who has repeatedly been accused of stealing things she likes without permission, the line is apparently non-existent.