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Brian Fantana

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Posts posted by Brian Fantana

  1. Not sure if anyone posted about it but I just learned that Heart O The Hills director Jane Ragsdale was killed in the flooding. Neither HotH or Camp Stewart were in session but both got hit. 

    I went to Stewart for 5 years and my grandparents were friends with the Ragsdales. I never met Jane but Si and Kathy were great people from what I remember. 

    I'm fortunate not to know anyone who had kids camping this year down there.

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  2. 8 hours ago, LCHorn said:

    I’ve beaten poor Anthony Mackie to death upthread for not having sufficient charisma to play the lead anything, but she’s a great example of someone who is probably in the same relative tier in looks and talent and she totally pops off the screen in everything I’ve seen her in.  
     

    Some performers just have it.  

    I didn't realize that the base jump in the opening scene was her really jumping off that building and not her stunt double. She was cabled up but that was a real jump actually off the real roof of that building with no netting or anything underneath her had something gone wrong.

  3. 1 hour ago, Drew said:

    Yeah It's really good...I'd say it's among the 2 or 3 best since Endgame(not saying much as they've ALL sucked except for Guardians 3 and maybe Shang Chi in a way?)

    It's the most down to earth, deeper thinking movie they've had since the end of phase 4...almost a bit depressing till the end

    It helps a lot that Florence Pugh and David Harbour both play their characters perfectly and have great on screen chemistry. I do not cry during movies and I damn near broke when they were having THAT father/daughter moment. 

    There could have been more character development outside of Yelena/Alexei/Bob, but it was their movie so I can forgive that.

  4. 42 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    Man, if after everything that has happened here the past ten years you're still not concerned about the most prestigious newspapers in our country lending mainstream legitimacy to fascist propaganda, I don't know what to tell you.   

    He was in here singing Cuomo's praises a month ago. The rapist backed by the same billionaires that back Trump. Doesn't seem to give a shit that Eric Adams is literally compromised by the DOJ and will just do whatever the Trump admin tells him to.

    He is nakedly concern trolling about the scary brown socialist.

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  5. 5 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    That's where we differ -- I don't see that statement as anything but all-encompassing.  Broad brushes piss me off.  

    That's fair. I didn't mean it that way. Let's leave it there and let this thread get back on track.

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  6. 3 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

    Iran president signs law suspending cooperation with IAEA

    Iran is also considering an entry ban on IAEA chief Rafael Grossi, after rejecting his request to visit nuclear sites.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/2/iran-president-signs-law-suspending-cooperation-with-iaea

    Yeah, the shittiest part I think is that I believe Iran would be open to re-establishing the terms of the JCPOA, but now I think they're getting desperate and going to take increasingly desperate measures.

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  7. Just now, Vegas64 said:

    Speaking of Trump's America. Is it not just WILD the whipsaw and whiplash since January? It's been 6 months and feels like 2 years worth of events and rollercoasters.

    The fact that I woke up this week and our stock market is at an all time high just 3 months after tanking it with self-imposed tariff-sized gunshot wounds to tank the market, is absolutely nuts.

    I'm so pissed about all of it, man. I'm not one of those people that can easily unplug myself from the news, so it is just....a lot.

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  8. 6 minutes ago, The Original Greaser Bob said:

    It seems to me that the primary bias that most American have, if they have one, is that they think of all Muslims as fundamentalist.  Whereas they are willing to parse the hardshell and softshell Christians and make allowances to Christians who aren't fundamentalists, they don't give Muslims the same leeway, ant throw them all into one big batch.  That's the problem.

    The other problem is conflating thoughts about religious beliefs with global politics. 

    Yeah I think this is a fair assessment.

    5 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    I think Fantana is somewhat conflating New York Democrats with “liberals.” Yeah, a lot of liberals have some degree of anti-Muslim bias just because for most it’s still an “other” that they don’t have much experience with, but there’s nothing that your ordinary liberal loves more than to think they’re multicultural and tolerant so that limits it quite a bit. 
     

    But a lot of New York Dems aren’t even liberal, they’re conservatives who happen to be Dems because in New York that’s the only real game in town. That leads to some confusion with New York liberal politicians as well who cater for those conservatives’ votes (I’m thinking Gillibrand here), but the real anti Muslim shit in New York isn’t coming from liberals.

    As is this.

    Look, I'm not trying to shit on anyone here. Even though I am frequently abrasive, my main beef is with "liberal" politicians, not your average, every day liberal, and sometimes I am bad about conflating the two.

    People's beliefs are complex and often contradictory (myself included), and I am super sensitive to anti-Muslim rhetoric specifically because of hate I have personally seen directed at people I care about far too often.

    So when I see card-carrying liberals describe someone like Mamdani as "dangerous", I hope you can understand why my hackles get raised, so to speak.

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  9. Just now, jimmyjazz said:

    You were the one who implied all liberals are scared of Muslims.  Maybe go take a writing course at some school other than Texas Tech.

    By the way, those anecdotes included growing up around dozens of Muslims my family would host when they came to the US to attend the engineering school my dad taught at.  They would break bread with us, stay with us, obviously take courses from my father, etc.  I learned about Lebanon, Iraq, Iran etc. in a very real manner, and without question my family was not an outlier.  It was a very common thing for university employees to bring those immigrant students into their households (as well as students from other parts of the world, primarily Asia).  So MY experience is that you're full of shit.

    Brother, your experience is most certainly an outlier among the American populace. I'm not sure how you can't see that. You grew up with very privileged in a way the vast majority of Americans do not. Period. I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all, mind you, you should feel very fortunate to have experience such a broad array of people from various cultures from a young age. 

    I'm not telling you that YOU are scared of Muslims, I'm telling you that a majority of Americans are and that the majority of liberals certainly have not elevated themselves above that to any appreciable degree. Seriously, read the book I linked you. I think you would enjoy it and find it illuminating.

  10. 9 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    The Islamic religion has a lot of problems that make many of its adherents problematic.

    The precise same thing can be said of Christians, and the problems are very similar in origin (ancient texts selectively interpreted by uneducated clerics and followed slavishly by uneducated adherents).

    The difference being that often, practitioners of Islam are brown, while practitioners of Christianity are white.  But even this isn't really true so much anymore.

    And Islam is not a minority religion.

    It's kind of like what is actually antisemitic and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.  Curiously, hardly anyone levels criticism at Judaism, per se.

    I mean yeah, all religious fundamentalism has this problem, including orthodox Judaism. Read about Kach and Baruch Goldstein sometime. That's not something you would ever learn about in Western curricula.

  11. 3 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    Thanks, Dad.  I'm comfortable in my skin and I cannot think of one person in my circle who is scared of Muslims.  Quite a few in that circle are Muslims themselves.  This is obviously a white knight issue for you but you are flat fucking wrong to paint with that broad brush.

    Ok, Rex. Your personal anecdotes ARE more important.

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  12. 1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

    So you're scared of Muslims?

    I'm not a liberal.

    17 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    Nobody ever claimed the "left of center" voting block is homogeneous.  There are always outliers.  To imply that all liberals are scared of Muslims is fucking ridiculous, full stop.

    Liberal Islamophobia is not a fringe element. It is pervasive in our society, and liberals are certainly not immune. Yes, obviously it is worse and amplified among conservatives and liberal politicians (who are largely conservatives themselves). I linked you a very good resource to learn about this from a respected academic who has spend decades studying it but, again, I suspect you have no interest in learning anything beyond your current point of view.

  13. 19 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    One thing that cracks me up, though, is it is scurrilously bad to paint with an overbroad brush on Muslims, but perfectly A-Ok to do the same thing about "Christians," who have a lot of the same problems, with less violence, and are probably more diverse from a "who calls themselves Christian" standpoint.

    This feels like the same energy as people who rail on about "anti-white racism"

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  14. 29 minutes ago, Im_smarter_then_you said:

    Are Jewish people not allowed in Lubbock?  Why do you hate them so much 

     

    25 minutes ago, Im_smarter_then_you said:

    It’s odd as I thought Fontana was a lib this whole time. Turns out he’s a trumper. Not uncommon in Lubbock I guess 

    Ok I can't resist, I so badly need to understand how you came to these conclusions. Unless this is just some diabolical gaslighting, in which case bravo.

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