She also claimed that she was asked to sign off the executive summary of the inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour party, without being allowed access to the underlying evidence, because the EHRC wanted the signoff from a BAME employee. She refused to do so, describing the request as “upsetting, disrespectful and humiliating”.
Which fits to a t the way the Tories use ethnical minorities as poster children for their most cruel policies. Rishi Sunak, chosen as PM to clean up the mess that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss left behind, tightening the austerity screws again. Suella Braverman, spouting National Front rhetoric about migrants, but if criticised has the press holloring about how you dare to expect a daughter of migrants not to be racist. Sunak again, spouting transphobia in his conference speech. A predictable pattern of using the brownest faces in the party to shield far right policies from scrutiny.
That it also occurred with that EHRC report into Labour antisemitism is telling. The report itself barely found any evidence of antisemitism in the party, certainly no systemic antisemitism. Nor did it find evidence that Corbyn and his allies were antisemitic. But it was certainly publicised as vindicating the ongoing smear campaign against him and Labour. Having a BAME employee sign off on it would’ve strengthened that impression.
The entire episode is nigh-unintelligible thanks to what is almost undoubtedly unedited machine translation. On the lighter end of things, there’s almost no proper punctuation. Four out of five sentences end without a period. Later in the episode, there are sections where two versions of a subtitle will appear side by side for reasons I cannot even figure out. I’m pretty sure every line in the subtitle script was fed individually through a translation program – because every line starts with a capitalized letter, regardless of whether it’s a new sentence.
The examples given are indeed egregious, but I want to focus on some less obvious mistakes, mistakes you can find in other anime as well. In the screenshot above, the translator has confused who is the subject of the sentence. When watching, it’s clear that she’s talking about him, not herself. Even if not clear from the scene itself, it should be clear from the preceeding ones, which saw him getting upset by his brothers not trusting him to do house work. It’s the sort of error you can make when you only have the to be translated text to go by, not the actual footage. An editor should’ve caught this, but how well if at all is any subtitling edited at Crunchyroll these days?
Here the tense is obviously wrong: it’s should be copying, not copied, as they’re still doing it. Ending on “as if nothing had happened” is also weird, a bit of a cliche translation of “atarimae darou”, more literal, as if it’s obvious or the most normal thing in the world to do. It does get the gist of what he’s saying, but it’s slightly awkward and lazy.
Watching through the rest of the episode it all gets so bad that it completely ruins the show. I cannot believe any human looked at this and thought it was good enough to release. You wouldn’t tolerate this reading a scanlated manga, let alone from a paid for service. The one thing Crunchyroll offers other than a convenient place to watch anime at and they fuck it up like this. Hope you weren’tlooking forward to this show.
Alex, an art student, dreams of joining Eve, the “Elite’s Visual School”. Together with her best friend Kimmy, they train hard to pass the notoriously impossible entrance exam. Alex’s training turns into an obsession, compromising her friendship with Kimmy.
Try Hard is the first of the graduation animations (teaser) made by the class of 2023 at Gobelins, a French school of “visual creation”, with each new animation released weekly on Wednesday. English subtitles are available if you don’t understand French.
Really a lovely bit of animation that makes me look forward to the other entries.
It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”
Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse over a seven-year period at the height of his fame.
The allegations between 2006 and 2013 were the result of a joint investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4 Dispatches. Brand denies the allegations.
Five alleged victims, four of them anonymous, were interviewed in the Dispatches documentary aired on Saturday night.
That first extract is from Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, a 2013 essay denouncing “callout culture” and arguing for leftist solidarity with people like Russel Brand and Owen Jones. Looking at it ten years after, it’s clear how pointless this investment in either was. Jones is just the liberal media’s punching bag and enforcer of the outer limits of acceptable left wing opinions and Brand is a scumbag rapist who rapidly descended into conspiracy thinking.
2013 was also the year that the rape accusations against a high ranking member of the SWP, “Comrade Delta”, later known to be Martin Smith, came to light. This is never mentioned; instead we get paragraphs like this:
‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.
Much of Exiting the Vampire’s Castle is like this. It reads like a generic “political correctness gone mad” rant, just from a lefist angle. If you don’t know the background against which it was published, you cannot know from reading it that it is indeed partially a response to those rape allegations against Smith, or the similar rumours about Brand. It’s thin gruel reading it from a 2023 perspective and it was thin gruel back then as well. It doesn’t engage with the criticism it is a response to. It never names the people it’s arguing against, nor makes concrete any of the criticism in the first place. It rejects it as wholly illegitimate instead and the people involved as (unwilling) tools of the ruling classes.
Exiting the Vampire’s Castle isn’t bad because it champions a man who a decade later is accused of multiple sexual assaults, but because it argues for a strain of reactionary leftism in which criticism is disallowed, especially if that criticism touches on issues of sexuality, race and gender. It aruges that as long as somebody is willing to make the right noises, their actions in their personal lives don’t matter. That’s why bringing it up in the context of the revelations about Russel Brand is justified, because it shows it does matter. You cannot argue for allowing a Brand a voice on the left without rejecting his victims and that’s what Fisher did, wittingly or unwittingly.
With the final episode of Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! only two days away, let’s look back at episode ten’s epic climax:
From the start Mygo!!!!! has been different from any other Bang Dream series, rougher, darker. Suddenly being in a girl’s band wasn’t all smiles and friendships anymore. Being in a band could hurt you, as it hurt Tomori when Crychic, her first band broke up in the very first scene of the series, leaving her feeling lost and blaming herself for the breakup. Episode three showed exactly how much its breakup messed her up and why she was wary when Anon dragged her into a new band. Yet she did join, as did Taki and Soyo, both also having been hurt by that breakup, both now looking for a new start.
But that was a lie. Anon may have been transparent and open in her desire to use being in a band to get popular, but both Taki and Soyo had ulterior motives too. Taki just wanted to be with Tomori and it didn’t matter how, while Soyo saw the new band as a way to get the old one back together. When that failed Tomori’s worst nightmare happened again. Once again she was alone, once again she failed in keeping her band together.
Episode ten is where she fights back, the only way she can. She books a series of performances at Ring and starts singing her frustrations. First alone, but quickly joined by Raana, the lead guitarist, who is content to be there to provide the background music. Taki too joins quickly, forced to by Raana. Anon is harder to convince but Anon is also the one who gets Soyo to be there, who drags her onto the stage and gets her to play.
It’s hard to understate how different this performance is from any other Bandori performance. The band completely ignores the audience, are purely playing for themselves. Their focus is Soyo who in turn only has eyes for them. The song’s structure too is a far cry from what we’re used to from Bang Dream songs. Just compare with the much more typical Haruhikage from episode seven. Both are good songs but even the slightly more polished official release is so much more interesting. The rawness of Tomori’s singing, the willingness to abandon the usual structure of Bang Dream songs, the emotion, it all makes it the perfect climax to the first ten episodes. The band has come to its lowest point and together they’re climbing back up again. And it’s all thanks to Tomori.
It’s Tomori’s desperation to be understood that drives that performance. From that very first performance, standing along, reading out the song as if it was a poem, the need to connect to her band mates is clear. That it’s Raana who’s drawn in first fits. She may look like she has the least connection to her fellow band members, but she also understand them the best. It’s her that then forces Taki to join, exactly the person Tomori needs to be there before she can even think about getting Anon and Soyo back. It’s also the first time we’ve seen Raana be restrained in her guitar playing, to support Tomori like Taki supports her.
Tomori then recruiting Anon is the mirror image of how Anon got Tomori back into doing music. And it’s only Anon who could’ve brought Soyo back. Anon might have been hurt by her manipulations, but she understands Soyo, she knows how to push her buttons to get her there. Tomori dragging her to the stage and Anon dragging her on it, a cocky grin on her face is the perfect encapsulation of their relationship. The small details of Anon cupping her face and Raana skipping back to her position after handing Soyo her bass are the cherry on the cake.
The performance itself, Tomori facing down Soyo, back to the audience, with Raana and Anon flanking her, Taki providing rock solid support from the back: you can feel the emotions running loose even before the water works start. It’s the sort of performance that you’d never forget if you’d been there; there will be quite a few people wishing they had been there, or will make out they had been, or at Tomori’s earlier gigs. It’s like having been at the first Sex Pistols gig: something new is starting even if you don’t quite know what.
