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I'm assuming checking for bombs/weapons - from what I've heard, Hamas isn't above suicide bomb vests.

The images that Israel claims are of fighters arrested and stripped in Gaza include a journalist and his family, two teenage boys, one United Nations employee, and the director of an UNRWA school.

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Referencing gay couples using surrogacy, and I assume pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming the "right" want to treat women like The Handmaid's Tale while also supporting paying women to bear children for men. I only recognize the top left as Shane Dawson and his husband, though, no idea who the other two couples are, so it could be something more specific given the controversial/morally abhorrent things Dawson has said about children and then being allowed to pay to have children.

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I promise this is in good faith. These are the reasons I tend to have a problem and that I've seen around before.

1) The hypocrisy. It's perfectly acceptable to raceswap white characters, but raceswapping or even drawing a character with skin a shade too light is considered racist and will bring death threats and harassment.

2) The redhead erasure. I know this is about Astrid, but since the original post is left vague, I do want to point out just how often it is that redheads get raceswapped and quite frequently arent even still redheaded, so not just being raceswapped, but having their own minority status erased. As a redhead myself, I am not thrilled. Guess I should be happy it was Astrid and not Stoic or Hiccup that got the swap.

3) Culture. In the most recent cases of Ariel and Astrid, both characters have historical/cultural reasons to be cast as white. The Little Mermiad of course is a European fairytale based off of Danish folklore that does hold cultural significance - there's a statue honoring the story in Coopenhagen, and if I remember right, even in folklore the mermaid is described with red hair.

In Astrid's case, you can't get more white than a literal Norse viking. I believe the Norse did have contact with the Romans so theres a possibility they'd have encountered a few people from outside Europe, but I find it unlikely to say the least that a young black girl or family would end up in their care, and in the original movies we never get an indication that Astrid is any kind of outsider - far from it, shes the golden girl of the village - so making that change in her character would fundamentally change her character. Thats a tangent, though, so back to this bullet point. There's absolutely no reason for a Norse Viking to be portrayed as any other race from a cultural perspective, and if this were any other native group, they wouldn't. They wouldn't cast a black actor to play an Ainu man or a Cherokee warrior or a Mongol invader or any other native people - or at least they wouldn't do so without controversy - so why are white people the only ones allowed to be raceswapped? I've seen too many times on this site and others that white people have no culture - well, we do, but this is how elements of those cultures are treated.

4) Corporate Shielding. The HTTYD news hasn't been out long enough to really start stirring things, but Disney and other studies have been doing this for years now: race-swapping characters as a way of pre-emptively deflecting any and all criticism with the "You're just racist" shield. They're doing it right now to explain why The Little Mermaid is bombing in China, to explain away poor reviews that say nothing about the actress's race, and now any and all criticism of what, as far as I can tell from reviewers I trust, is a fairly mid movie first has to battle through the "I'm not racist" crap before they can actually get to their points.

I have a strong feeling that we'll see a similar response with HTTYD, with any criticism of how the dragons look (because let's be real, there's no way theyre looking as good and natural as the animated versions) the costuming, or just how lacking it is compared to the animated original brushed aside with "youre just mad about Astrid being black". We saw this happen with Captain Marvel as well so it's not just race, but using any minority status of the leads or side characters as a way of deflecting criticism and making out people that didn't enjoy the piece is question as bigots. It's usually not true and it's exhausting and infuriating that you have to go through a whole song and dance before being allowed to actually criticize something.

5) Character and Creativity. From what I've heard, Halle Bailey is a phenomenal singer. I would have loved to see her as a Disney Princess - her own Disney princess. But rather than putting in the creative effort to craft a new character and story for her, they slapped her into a pre-existing character slot (the only redheaded Disney princess they could have, again, since I don't think even Disney is Brave enough to touch the entirety of Scotland) and is now forever known as Black Ariel. Rather than given a new character to inspire kids with, Bailey is going to be known as an inferior copy to a beloved classic character, and that seems more offensive to me and a waste of her talents. Disney could have used this movie as a way of expanding the Little Mermaid's world, the way they did with the Tinkerbell movies, and brought in new characters played by various races to improve the diversity, but instead chose the lazy remake (and I'm so sick of all of these live action remakes, they're pretty much all visually lacking and creatively bankrupt, but you couldn't say that about this one or else you were racist) and threw Bailey in there to pretend they were shaking anything up or adding anything creatively to the story.

As a point of comparison, look at Across the Spider-verse. It has an enormous cast of characters, and I'm fairly certain that of the ones that actually matter, only two are white - Gwen and Peter (and their families but that's side side characters). Miles, Hobie, Miguel, Jeff and Rio Morales, Indian Spider-man (I'm on mobile and can't look up how to spell his name, I'm sorry), Miles's roommate, and most of the supporting cast in every world are all POC, and you haven't heard one complaint about that. Spider-verse in general has been held up as being actually creative with character design and representation by giving us a variety of Spider people of all races and backgrounds without just lazily raceswapping a Peter Parker. Representation based on existing franchise and white characters can happen, it's usually far better recieved when there's actually creative effort behind that representation - and white-to-black raceswaps ain't it.

So yeah - if they wanted to create a character that was adopted into the tribe from afar but is visually and either internally or externally outcasted from them, and then uses the mutual feeling of non-belonging to forge a connection with Hiccup, that could be an interesting way to add a black character into this film - but as far as we know, either they didn't do that and just raceswapped Astrid anyway, or they did do that and fundamentally changed Astrid's character from golden girl of the village to fellow outcast. In which case, just make a new character anyway if this is going to be in name only.

Closer: So am I racist now lol?

But like, legit, there are reasons to not be happy with race-swapping other than being a racist, you know?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I literally could not give less of a shit if a white character is portrayed as another race in a new adaptation.

Who fucking cares? Most of the time, the character's race literally does not make a difference to who they are as a character, so why should it matter if there's a version of them that isn't white?

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'03 had Casey's not-sister Angel, but I don't think she was in very many episodes.

I kind of wish that instead of TMNT turning April into a teen all the time, they just gave her a teenage daughter. That way, we add some more girls to the cast, and we get to keep adult April.

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The actual American version of Death Note

Super hero concept

Teen who lives in California and sees that the prisons have become a revolving door, releasing dangerous criminals left and right, everywhere there's homelessness, stores are legally allowed to be robbed up to a hundreds of dollars, and drug addiction is aided with needles but not bathrooms.

He and his friends become gun toting vigilantes in a gun free zone. Saving the helpless from gangs, and helping the poor.

The comic would be banned in 7 states, but still be a massive hit lol

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Things that People Forget About When Writing Sword Fights

You don’t have to dodge by a foot. You only have to dodge by an inch.

Not all swords are made the same way. You wouldn’t fight with a katana the same way you would fight with a broadsword.

You don’t need to aim for the heart or the head. Get the vein in wrist, and you could incapacitate that hand.

Small cuts matter. If you’re cut up enough, you’re going to start suffering from blood loss, and that’ll put you at a disadvantage.

The blade isn’t the only thing that matters. There isn’t some set of rules in sword fighting where you can only stick the stabby end into the other person. Hit them in the head with the hilt, and they’ll feel it.

If there are multiple attackers, you want to incapacitate or kill each one as quickly as possible. Endurance matters, especially when you’re not only swinging/stabbing/aiming something that is 2-5 lbs (ceremonial ones were a lot heavier, but wouldn’t be generally fought with) but also taking/blocking heavy blows from at least one opponent.

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Black-only audience

Only 3.5% of Canada is black.

Good luck with getting the revenue needed to stay open.

Whatch as racists find new and exciting ways to get segregation brought back at the behest of the people that fought to get the original laws repealed.

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Alright, speaking as someone that actually watched the show before seeing this -

The guy points out some interesting bits of evidence that certain structures and civilizations are older than we give them credit for - temples that line up with the movement of the star Sirus after the ice age, man-made ruts that continue well below the current shore line and imply they're much older than they're noted to be, underwater road-like structures, maps of shorelines that hadnt been above water for 12,000 years, etc. Those points are genuinely intriguing and should be given more study, as I don't find it difficult to believe that there were civilizations we know nothing about that appeared and disappeared before Mesopotamia. His unifying theory, though, that it's one mega civilization that was wiped out in comet-induced floods, has no real legs to stand on. He has no real evidence to support it beyond some common folklore and symbols, and while I can believe that after the end of the Ice Age, flooding would have occurred and been traumatic enough to implant itself into the folktales of multiple civilizations (hell, look at Doggerland),there's just not enough evidence to support more than just pockets of civilizations more advanced than hunter/gathers that rose and fell thousands of years ago. I'd like to see further excavation and examinations of some of the sites he points out, but his theory just lacks any real evidence to tie it together until then.

And this is blindingly obvious to anyone that watches it, so this person really just has their panties in a wad that someone dares pose alternative theories and get interviewed by Joe Roegan. I'm sorry you don't have any critical thinking skills and can't imagine that anyone else would, and therefore need to ban anything not backed up by The Science.

"Why has this been allowed?", tells you everything you need to know about the person who wrote the article.

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I’ve actually been to Coral Castle, sat in those chairs shown in the last picture - surprisingly extremely comfortable, could absolutely see sleeping on it. Never knew coral could be so nice to lay on.

Would’ve been an excellent #geologist. — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/Zp0VH2b

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For those who lack wood stoves or other alternative means of heating, techniques like this could save your life in winter power outages

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Old bad movies are usually bizarrely awful, like so far from competent that it loops right back around to being a baffling pile of crap that can be readily poked fun at and enjoyed for how insane it is, or they clearly from a place of earnest creativity that can be respected even if the end result is shit.

New bad movies just tend to be bland and irritating that very few people actually believed in, and thats not fun to make fun of or respectable.

Old movies that suck and are awful are great, but new movies that suck and are awful are stupid. Hope this helps

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The video isn't loading for me, but I think it would be helpful to know she played it twice. Once, properly dressed and beautifully, and then again at her concert very scantily clad and twerking, with the sound of the flute sounding very subpar.

So there's two different stories because there's two different events, and I can absolutely say that there's no problem with the former, but I think twerking with a 200 year old priceless historical artifact while dressed like you work at a brothel is disrespectful.

Flautist Melissa Jefferson plays slaver James Madison's 200-year-old crystal flute in the Library of Congress.