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Jedit posted:For everyone who has been keeping The Shepherd's Crown unopened so there'll always be a Pterry book they haven't read: the last collection of his early short stories just came out. What’s it called?
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Sep 11, 2020 11:37
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Snowmankilla posted:What’s it called? The Time-Travelling Caveman.
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Sep 11, 2020 13:14
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Warden posted:He didn't. He had the journalist watched in case someone else tried to have him whacked, and the journalist threw a peppermint bomb at Angua to get her off his trail. After that, Vimes said gently caress it, and left him to his own devices. I'm not disputing your description of events but I do not see those events the same way. I do not see a lot of daylight between "cop getting pissy and withdrawing protection from a public figure whom criminals are actively trying to whack" and "setting a public figure up to be whacked". It reminds me too much of the bullshit cops get up to in real life. If you want to stick to fiction, it is similar to what Captain McCluskey does during Vito's hospitalization in the Godfather, except in Pratchett's case, without the conspiracy with a Sollozzo figure. Maybe the lack of that conspiracy means a lot to some readers, but I find it small comfort. Yes, Vimes didn't hire the murderers, but he knew someone was out there, and said "gently caress it" anyway. There's some daylight between the two, sure, if that's the difference you want to split, but for me the two are close enough that I was never able to buy the pro-cop direction the watch stories seemed to go after that. After all the watch novels I'm still unsure if Pratchett was ambivalent about the morality of his supercop and if so, to what extent. I'd love to hear other readers' readings of the arc of the Watch novels.
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Sep 11, 2020 15:39
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Sarern posted:I'm not disputing your description of events but I do not see those events the same way. If y’all are discussing “the truth” that’s not a vimes novel, and if we let DeWorde be trailed by our infallible heroes there isn’t the opportunity for his dramatic victories, instead he’s just be saved by angua or carrot at the last second. It also would go against his personal growth as a wannabe maverick who is going against his family. I don’t think it’s any deeper than that.
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Sep 11, 2020 15:48
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Sarern posted:I'm not disputing your description of events but I do not see those events the same way. Well, that is a kinda far fetched association. Especially given that Pratchett was British and your associations are pretty much to US police, which are not really the norm of a western society. If I recall, most British police officers doesn’t even carry firearms. And as a previous poster wrote, if you thought anything bad would really happen to a Pratchett protagonist, you haven’t read enough Pratchett.
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Sep 11, 2020 17:46
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quote:if you thought anything bad would really happen to a Pratchett protagonist, you have
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Sep 11, 2020 18:00
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Two minutes of googling finds plenty about the British police, like fighting strikers and torturing separatists. Being less bad than the US police is not a high bar. My question was not so much about the level of police brutality in Britain as about how people interpret the novels. A reader who has experienced US police, or is from northern Ireland and remembers the Troubles, or is of Pakistani descent while in the UK, is going to unconsciously draw from that experience when they read the text. The responses are great, thank you for telling me how you interpret the novels.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:26
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Op Demetrius was run mainly by the British Army and its more extreme techniques came from the SIS. There are plenty of things to blame the RUC for which aren't that.
Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 18:43
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Sarern posted:I'm not disputing your description of events but I do not see those events the same way. De Worde assaulted the officer assigned to protect him.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:38
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SirSamVimes posted:De Worde assaulted the officer assigned to protect him. Though in fairness, she was protecting him clandestinely, which is why he got away with it, since prosecuting him would have revealed that the Watch's rumored werewolf was in fact Angua. Warden fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 21:46
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SirSamVimes posted:De Worde assaulted the officer assigned to protect him. Can we get a version of the events that is unbiased? 
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Sep 11, 2020 21:52
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Warden posted:Though in fairness, she was protecting him clandestinely, which is why he got away with it, since prosecuting him would have revealed that the Watch's rumored werewolf was in fact Angua. To be fair, he thought he was assaulting Knobby.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:53
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Ankh-Morpork is also always presented as a city far too big for the Watch to...watch...effectively. The series of events was de Worde starting a ruckus by offering a reward for the lost dog, on top of a very tense situation since the Patrician was out and accused of treason, politicking for a new Patrician to take over, and then he goes and sensory-bombs the Watch's werewolf officer in order to get at a key witness of the whole issue alone.
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Sep 12, 2020 00:17
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Trin Tragula posted:Op Demetrius was run mainly by the British Army and its more extreme techniques came from the SIS. There are plenty of things to blame the RUC for which aren't that. You can blame the Metropolitan Police as well for bad acts, I am given to understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ezgAQ4oToY ...the longer I live, the more amazed I am as to how correct and yet ahead of her time Sinead O'Connor was. Context (not for you, Trin): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Colin_Roach
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Sep 12, 2020 05:04
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If anyone's more interested in the context around Colin Roach, the Hackney Community Defence Association has moved a lot of its material online, I particularly recommend Fighting the Lawmen. This sort of thing is what's always made me deeply ambivalent about Pratchett's presentation of police; there are far too many examples of how this is where "who watches the watchmen?" "me" actually leads to.
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Sep 12, 2020 15:37
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Ankh-Morpork is also run by a benevolent dictator. I think it's always been part of the joke that, in their very first book together in the first book of the Watch series, when Vimes and Vetinari talk at the end, that they both know they're being insane and hypocritical about their own cynicism about humanity.quote:“Do you believe all that, sir?” he said. “About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?” Pratchett was never out to make a political treatise. I've always loved and respected that part of him that remains staunchly humanist to the core in all his works, and that means acknowledging our fundamental flaws and being a great enough comedy writer to make a joke about it. toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 21:25
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Sarern posted:After all the watch novels I'm still unsure if Pratchett was ambivalent about the morality of his supercop and if so, to what extent. I'd love to hear other readers' readings of the arc of the Watch novels. Vimes is a bit of a bastard. But he's aware of it and he's also less of a bastard than the villains he's after.
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Sep 13, 2020 19:24
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Sam Vimes posted:There's lots of people will help you with the alcohol business, but there's no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, "My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious bastard."
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Sep 13, 2020 20:23
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I always kinda read the inner cop of Vimes as being his sense of justice and indignation, because thats who watches the watchmen. I like it because as vimes becomes a better person and less repressed so does the watch.even Nobby becomes a better (technicaly) human as the series goes on. Discworld is a fantasy land and acepting that not all cops are bastards is about on the same level of acepting Death strolling about and having a little rodent sidekick.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:22
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Vetinari posted:I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:46
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Any modern police service that had the morals and ethos of Vimes’s watch would definitely be an improvement, yes. Mostly the watch stuff is just Pratchett playing with genres again. He starts off with a sword and sorcery style fantasy city with a Thieves and Assassin’s Guild and various kinds of ineffectual guards and watchmen because that’s what you would find in a typical 70s/80s fantasy novel. Then starting from those premises he writes it like a mix of noir fiction and police procedural. This is distinct from “noir in fantasy” like Garrett, P.I. because Pratchett isn’t trying to write a believable world, he’s trying to point out absurdity so we can all laugh at it.
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Sep 14, 2020 02:49
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Ultimately Pratchett always seemed pretty hopepunk - as in, a better world is possible, but only if we constantly bust our asses and put our asses on the line to ensure that adequate transparency and due process is in place, and that we need a system of checks and balances to ensure that individual bad actors do not pervert the system. His definition of what "a cop" should be is also very different, and founded on different principles, from the American view. You're all no doubt already aware of Peelian policing principles from the man himself, but it's remembering that's what he had in mind.
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Sep 14, 2020 06:14
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Kesper North posted:Ultimately Pratchett always seemed pretty hopepunk I’m sorry, but this word gives me hives.
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Sep 14, 2020 09:25
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Kesper North posted:You're all no doubt already aware of Peelian policing principles from the man himself, but it's remembering that's what he had in mind. And if you're not, the most important part of the Peelian principles is policing by consent. The policeman isn't a special breed set apart and above to enforce the law; he is a member of the community, working with the community.
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Sep 14, 2020 09:28
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Kesper North posted:Ultimately Pratchett always seemed pretty hopepunk - as in, a better world is possible, but only if we constantly bust our asses and put our asses on the line to ensure that adequate transparency and due process is in place, and that we need a system of checks and balances to ensure that individual bad actors do not pervert the system. His definition of what "a cop" should be is also very different, and founded on different principles, from the American view. You're all no doubt already aware of Peelian policing principles from the man himself, but it's remembering that's what he had in mind.
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Sep 14, 2020 10:40
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The_Doctor posted:I’m sorry, but this word gives me hives. same and if you want to see other really idiotic words, here's a nice list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives
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Sep 14, 2020 11:01
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Xander77 posted:None of that is true. Pratchett takes his lines directly from Dickens, and its all about "good people" in key positions rather than any form of systemic change. The Dickens point is right and his and Pratchett’s protagonists are also good people; it’s not correct to infer from that that he (or Dickens) were just idiots who thought that having nice people in the right positions would fix everything wrong, in contrast with the wise and informed observers who know that systemic problems exist. Pratchett isn’t writing Communist Manifesto II : this time, it’s systemic. He is writing a series of funny parodies of fantasy literature that, over time, include more and more of his personal philosophy that people should be nice to each other and should think harder about what that actually means. In the course of this he ends up taking a position on a lot of real systemic problems like how to reconcile deeply held cultural beliefs when you emigrate, the stereotyping that’s common in fantasy, feminism, broad based prejudice, nationalism and so on and relating them all back to a guiding principle that what is good and proper is to be nice and understanding to people whoever they are. It’s a very gentle kind of humanism, and that helped it slip under the radar of people who were looking out for an attack and influence their thinking too. His later books are more focused on systemic problems (the Moist Von Lipwig stuff) and a lot of the time they do say “Hey, the problem is Bob the Bad Banker”. That is almost certainly a necessary step in persuading someone who doesn’t already believe that bad bankers are a real problem. So if you want to analyse it from the perspective of “is it good socialist propaganda”, I think it’s excellent propaganda targeted at the broad mass of the population who are not already socialist.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:53
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Apparently filming for The Watch wrapped: https://twitter.com/rhipratchett/status/1305507935787900928
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Sep 14, 2020 17:40
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Serperoth posted:Apparently filming for The Watch wrapped: It gets worse; Simon Allen is the sole credited creator on IMDb.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:11
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Jedit posted:It gets worse; Simon Allen is the sole credited creator on IMDb. Graham Linehan was too busy on Mumsnet.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:16
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Jedit posted:It gets worse; Simon Allen is the sole credited creator on IMDb. IMDb is user-edited, that means nothing.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:39
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Beefeater1980 posted:
Well, he kind of was, in the later stuff. It’s just that, rather like Marx, he didn’t live long enough to get beyond the point of covering the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Ankh Morpork never really got to have a version of the 1832 Reform act, let alone any kind of universal franchise democracy. Perhaps by the 60th book of the Discworld series, the timeline would have advanced beyond the early 21C. Pratchett was more or less a Fabian socialist. Which implies believing that incremental progress, including that enabled by powerful people being personally good, is a thing that makes systematic change more, not less, likely.
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Sep 15, 2020 01:06
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Ook
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Sep 15, 2020 02:38
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Ook?  Oook ook! 
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Sep 15, 2020 02:55
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radmonger posted:Perhaps by the 60th book of the Discworld series, the timeline would have advanced beyond the early 21C. No. A few months before he had to stop writing Pterry said that Discworld technology and society wasn't ever going to advance beyond the level it was at in Raising Steam. (He did, however, add that the Disc already had the technology required for radio.)
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Sep 15, 2020 09:38
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The_Doctor posted:I’m sorry, but this word gives me hives. It's not ideal, I admit, but it's what I have. Can you suggest a better one for the same set of concepts? "Humanism" seems speciesist, in context.
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Sep 15, 2020 11:46
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Hopeful, optimistic. Just use an adjective, rather than smash two words together.
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Sep 15, 2020 11:56
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The_Doctor posted:Hopeful, optimistic. Just use an adjective, rather than smash two words together. Agreed. He’s a hopetimist.
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Sep 15, 2020 12:15
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hanales posted:Agreed. He’s a hopetimist. HOPETIMUS PRIME I just want a word that isn't a prime rhyme with pope or nope.
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Sep 15, 2020 12:31
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Beefeater1980 posted:The Dickens point is right and his and Pratchett’s protagonists are also good people; it’s not correct to infer from that that he (or Dickens) were just idiots who thought that having nice people in the right positions would fix everything wrong, in contrast with the wise and informed observers who know that systemic problems exist. I'm talking about Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books. You may know him as the guy who stans for an enlightened dictatorship and whose only explicit mention of democracy in the modern timeline involves "and so they voted for bread and circuses, haha, stupid masses"? The guy for whom every single person pushing for civil rights is either a moron or a fraud (because that's politics, and what kind of decent person would go into that)? The guy who does "minority rights advocates are just elitist SJW's, real (model) minorities don't concern themselves with that nonsense" jokes straight out of Mallard Fillmore? The guy who wrote a book where a person sent to inspect the police force (for the first time ever, apparently, since Vimes is enough of a moral paragon that he can police himself) was an annoying interfering twerp who only came around (to be a real manly man who attacks protesters) once he realized that the police force are the thin blue line that separates society from chaos? ... I'm not suggesting he's a Garrison level (as an aside, that's another person who takes issue with He's just (to use the Disco-Elyisum term) a true-born, dyed in the wool moralist. Who absolutely does believe that "having nice people in the right positions would fix everything wrong" - and of course, nice people believe in common sense consensus-liberal politics, they just aren't... you know, political or loud about it.
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Sep 15, 2020 13:06
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