Decent story, although it felt a bit... in-between, I guess? Like, last week was a big story beat, and next week will be a big story beat, but this was just kind of there because they have to get from point A to point B.
Also, I'm honestly not sure whether they're actually trying to write Nissa as gay, or if they're trying for a friendship and just overshooting it really really hard. I mean, either is perfectly fine (I mean, obviously if it's the latter I'd hope they could at least dial it down so you could know what they're going for), but hoo boy does Nissa ever come across as gay.
Remember that the next time you talk about white cops and all white juries.
False equivalency. ON the one hand, we have Trump declaring that Judge Curiel is going to be biased as a result of his race. He doesn't point to any action by Curiel in the past that would support this, he's saying that it's self-evident. Clearly because this man is Hispanic, he is going to unfairly rule against me. He uses his general impression of a group to declare specifics about an individual that he knows nothing else about.
When people talk about police brutality, while that is sometimes made about race, I've typically seen it as directed against police as a whole--that their methods of operation disproportionately target black people, that black people are disproportionately subject to police violence, that perpetrators of police violence frequently end up with extremely light punishments, and that police, as a whole, tend to close ranks when asked to police themselves more strictly (I do have to admit, I'm at least impressed by how strong they've kept their union). This isn't to point fingers at any specific cop and say they're racist or corrupt or what have you, at least not before the fact, but rather to suggest that institutional change is necessary.
As for juries, I'm honestly not as well informed on the issue. I think I would point out that while they are, in theory held to the same standards of impartiality, jurors are pretty inevitably not going to be as experienced in this matter as actual legal professionals. And that's why there's multiple people on a jury, after all, but I don't really have anything further to add.
The accusation, leveled at the judge purely on the basis of his race, is that he is incapable of adequately performing his duties as a judge.
The legal system does not keep a mandatory list of every single judge's personal history and preferences in an attempt to ensure absolute non-bias, because that is impossible. It does not assign judges based on race, because that would inevitably be a racist policy. It is set up so that judges, having reached that position, and with their decisions and behavior in court being subject to review, will maintain impartiality in the cases that they hear. This is regardless of their outside affiliations, personal history, or ethnicity. And they do a pretty remarkable job of that, on the whole! And this applies to all judges, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or experience. There is no meaningful evidence, whatsoever, that Judge Curiel has in any way failed to fulfill his responsibilities in the past.
To use an extreme example, let's take a hypothetical person who has committed violent hate crimes against every ethnicity, minority, and ideology other than his own. Should judges that are a member of any one of those groups recuse themselves? Are the only people that can be allowed to judge his case those people that match his race, religion, personal outlook, etc.? I think that's pretty clearly not the case, in the general sense (unless you call into question the entire legal profession, in which case you are absolutely up to your eyeballs in tribalism). Since it's not true in the general sense, to hold it as true against a specific subset because of race is, well, racist.
Ljoss, you seem to be using an incredibly narrow definition of racism here. Would he have needed to hurl ethnic slurs at the judge to meet your criteria?
Judges are held to a high standard. To reach a position where he'd be hearing cases as large as the Trump one, this man has gone through college and law school, practiced law likely first as an attorney before becoming a judge in the first place, and served as a judge for a fair while. So he's got quite a bit of experience, and part of that is being impartial, because that is a basic requirement for being a judge.
So eventually, the Trump case gets assigned to him. I should note here that as a legal part of doing their jobs, judge have to have a very good reason to recuse themselves (to prevent boring/complicated/unpleasant case from bouncing around forever), typically on the level of conflict of interest or a personal involvement with the case; a potential bias as nebulous as this does not qualify as a reason--note that Trump's lawyers never submitted a motion to have a different judge assigned based on this reasoning, because they would get their careers slapped down for doing something so incredibly unprofessional. Trump says that because the judge is part of an ethnicity that he has campaigned against, he isn't capable of being impartial--of fulfilling the basic requirements of his own job. That his personal feelings and loyalty to his background are bound to overcome any sense of professionalism or duty that he has, and that he's going to look to unfairly rule against Trump. And Trump's purported reason for objection isn't nuanced; he literally just pointed to the judge's ethnicity, not any particular action on the judge's part.
Now, he did later expand on this to mention that the judge belongs to "La Raza". Oh no! A Hispanic judge is a member of... an organization for Hispanics in the legal profession, that happens to share its name with another La Raza. If that isn't an attempt to use scare words to signal racists, what exactly is the intent?
I find the "But everything would be totally different, these people wouldn't have been born!" argument to be really, really hollow. Yes, from a scientific standpoint, things would have been wildly different! But what story has ever done that? Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" is about as classic a time travel story as you can get, and the main character of that changes things back in dinosaur times, and when he arrives back in 'his' present, the exact same people were running for presidency on the exact same platforms, except the other guy won (and some words are spelled differently). It's a much more interesting story beat to show Zurgo as High King *****kicker Khan of the Mardu contrasted with Zurgo "Gets Yelled at by Kolaghan" Bellstriker than it is to say "Here's Zurgo, he's awesome! Now Zurgo never existed at all! Wasn't that great?". Saying that it needs to follow strict logic just comes across as you trying to find a way to feel superior to the authors for your superior understanding of a technology that doesn't actually exist.
Things do get a little muddled with the multiverse existing, but most everything works out the same, so hey. Sarkhan's existence is meant to be something that even Sarkhan isn't entirely sure about the logic of--his personal timeline is preserved (let's say by the same magic that whisked him through time in the first place), but from the perspective of anyone else in Tarkir, he popped up out of nowhere fully formed. It's a weird outlier created by strange magic. It doesn't exactly ruin my immersion.
I was initially pretty down on Surrak--he's not too flashy and "Formidable" automatically makes me start to disregard the text after it, but he's actually a 5/4 haste in green that gives your future plays haste too, and that's actually really solid.
if this really says: "a card in their graveyard" that makes him impossibly good. i play this vs a black deck. enemy wants to hero downfall it, too bad you already hero downfalled my stormbreath. take 10.
i call it now: if this really is a misstranslation and it says that "if a card with the same name is in your opponents graveyard" this will be a hillariously good finished for r/b decks and i take at least 3^^ more you probably dont want cause of legendary
Except it's only creature or planeswalker, so it's not quite as busted. Still good though.
I think that the story handled it really well--on the one hand it's a nice nod for some fans to relate to, on the other it helps illustrate what the whole concept of a war name is about, which gives us a better perspective of what the Mardu are like, in a way that doesn't feel forced (except, perhaps, for how Nameless Orc brings it up, but I can forgive an awkward bit of speech in an otherwise excellent story).
Tasigur seems like he's the Paris Hilton type and would rather be spending his time getting drunk and having sex instead of making his kingdom stronger.
I think that Tasigur is probably a surprisingly effective ruler. Not, perhaps, because his attitude would work particularly well in the real world, but as a character he feels like he's set up as the sort of person that everyone is going to habitually underestimate, plot against, and then get caught because everything about what the Sultai are--cruelty, intrigue, decadence and shrewd cunning--are so much a part of who Tasigur is that they're practically primal instincts. He doesn't look like he's ever paying attention purely because he doesn't have to. And now you are at what passes for his mercy, and you want to go back in time and strangle yourself to death before you even think of plotting against him, because that's a kinder fate that what you're up for now. Also, while I have nothing to base this on whatsoever, I feel like he probably orders a lot of similar military actions as Sidisi would, but out of purely decadent reasons. Today, he feels like dining on dragon flesh, accompanied by peeled grapes chilled with snow fresh from the peaks of the Temur frontier. Also, he needs new serving slaves, because reasons.
Zendikar isn't that far in the past, but Ob Nixilis being a walker is. Really, it's interesting to get a look at him pre-demonization, and I do like how there's bits of Magic history that we haven't seen.
I think I'll put my money on Nahiri and a Flamekin/Cinder Planeswalker to finally have a Lorwyn rep, because if they do an old plane callback they're going to want it to be something unique to that plane.
They leaned a bit heavily on the side of "make sure the deck has room to grow", but that's not a *huge* issue. I think I would switch out the dictates for something else, and up the Chieftain count because they're kind of what sells the deck theme, but you can see what the deck's going for, and it's an alright starting point for that. You won't be winning an FNM with this anytime soon, but you can at least be in a position to have fun (though again, it is undertuned for what I think they want).
Also, I'm honestly not sure whether they're actually trying to write Nissa as gay, or if they're trying for a friendship and just overshooting it really really hard. I mean, either is perfectly fine (I mean, obviously if it's the latter I'd hope they could at least dial it down so you could know what they're going for), but hoo boy does Nissa ever come across as gay.
False equivalency. ON the one hand, we have Trump declaring that Judge Curiel is going to be biased as a result of his race. He doesn't point to any action by Curiel in the past that would support this, he's saying that it's self-evident. Clearly because this man is Hispanic, he is going to unfairly rule against me. He uses his general impression of a group to declare specifics about an individual that he knows nothing else about.
When people talk about police brutality, while that is sometimes made about race, I've typically seen it as directed against police as a whole--that their methods of operation disproportionately target black people, that black people are disproportionately subject to police violence, that perpetrators of police violence frequently end up with extremely light punishments, and that police, as a whole, tend to close ranks when asked to police themselves more strictly (I do have to admit, I'm at least impressed by how strong they've kept their union). This isn't to point fingers at any specific cop and say they're racist or corrupt or what have you, at least not before the fact, but rather to suggest that institutional change is necessary.
As for juries, I'm honestly not as well informed on the issue. I think I would point out that while they are, in theory held to the same standards of impartiality, jurors are pretty inevitably not going to be as experienced in this matter as actual legal professionals. And that's why there's multiple people on a jury, after all, but I don't really have anything further to add.
The legal system does not keep a mandatory list of every single judge's personal history and preferences in an attempt to ensure absolute non-bias, because that is impossible. It does not assign judges based on race, because that would inevitably be a racist policy. It is set up so that judges, having reached that position, and with their decisions and behavior in court being subject to review, will maintain impartiality in the cases that they hear. This is regardless of their outside affiliations, personal history, or ethnicity. And they do a pretty remarkable job of that, on the whole! And this applies to all judges, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or experience. There is no meaningful evidence, whatsoever, that Judge Curiel has in any way failed to fulfill his responsibilities in the past.
To use an extreme example, let's take a hypothetical person who has committed violent hate crimes against every ethnicity, minority, and ideology other than his own. Should judges that are a member of any one of those groups recuse themselves? Are the only people that can be allowed to judge his case those people that match his race, religion, personal outlook, etc.? I think that's pretty clearly not the case, in the general sense (unless you call into question the entire legal profession, in which case you are absolutely up to your eyeballs in tribalism). Since it's not true in the general sense, to hold it as true against a specific subset because of race is, well, racist.
I'm new to the discussion, so I wasn't aware of that specifically, but I can't say I'm surprised.
Judges are held to a high standard. To reach a position where he'd be hearing cases as large as the Trump one, this man has gone through college and law school, practiced law likely first as an attorney before becoming a judge in the first place, and served as a judge for a fair while. So he's got quite a bit of experience, and part of that is being impartial, because that is a basic requirement for being a judge.
So eventually, the Trump case gets assigned to him. I should note here that as a legal part of doing their jobs, judge have to have a very good reason to recuse themselves (to prevent boring/complicated/unpleasant case from bouncing around forever), typically on the level of conflict of interest or a personal involvement with the case; a potential bias as nebulous as this does not qualify as a reason--note that Trump's lawyers never submitted a motion to have a different judge assigned based on this reasoning, because they would get their careers slapped down for doing something so incredibly unprofessional. Trump says that because the judge is part of an ethnicity that he has campaigned against, he isn't capable of being impartial--of fulfilling the basic requirements of his own job. That his personal feelings and loyalty to his background are bound to overcome any sense of professionalism or duty that he has, and that he's going to look to unfairly rule against Trump. And Trump's purported reason for objection isn't nuanced; he literally just pointed to the judge's ethnicity, not any particular action on the judge's part.
Now, he did later expand on this to mention that the judge belongs to "La Raza". Oh no! A Hispanic judge is a member of... an organization for Hispanics in the legal profession, that happens to share its name with another La Raza. If that isn't an attempt to use scare words to signal racists, what exactly is the intent?
Things do get a little muddled with the multiverse existing, but most everything works out the same, so hey. Sarkhan's existence is meant to be something that even Sarkhan isn't entirely sure about the logic of--his personal timeline is preserved (let's say by the same magic that whisked him through time in the first place), but from the perspective of anyone else in Tarkir, he popped up out of nowhere fully formed. It's a weird outlier created by strange magic. It doesn't exactly ruin my immersion.
Except it's only creature or planeswalker, so it's not quite as busted. Still good though.
I think that Tasigur is probably a surprisingly effective ruler. Not, perhaps, because his attitude would work particularly well in the real world, but as a character he feels like he's set up as the sort of person that everyone is going to habitually underestimate, plot against, and then get caught because everything about what the Sultai are--cruelty, intrigue, decadence and shrewd cunning--are so much a part of who Tasigur is that they're practically primal instincts. He doesn't look like he's ever paying attention purely because he doesn't have to. And now you are at what passes for his mercy, and you want to go back in time and strangle yourself to death before you even think of plotting against him, because that's a kinder fate that what you're up for now. Also, while I have nothing to base this on whatsoever, I feel like he probably orders a lot of similar military actions as Sidisi would, but out of purely decadent reasons. Today, he feels like dining on dragon flesh, accompanied by peeled grapes chilled with snow fresh from the peaks of the Temur frontier. Also, he needs new serving slaves, because reasons.
Herp I'm a derp.
Because Zendikar would have been fine if some morons hadn't smashed the binding to bits.