I think the intent of the movie was to depict Ratchet as using her role and the putatively beneficial nature of her treatments to maintain her own power/control over a captive population and inflict pain either in retaliation for some challenge to that power or just for the hell of it.

if she was ONLY evil Fletcher wouldn’t have won the Oscar

I think people forget that Alcohol doesn’t “turn you into something else”.. it only lowers inhibitions.. basically the “REAL” you comes out..

So if he was drinking. that’s even more troubling.. it shows that he WANTS to kill people, but doesn’t (most likely for fear of reprisal and the repercussions on him)

I totally support things that truly offend people for good reason — confederate memorials from the early 20th century erected by white legislators as a form of social intimidation? Clearly a bad idea.

I think part of the reason people defend usage of words that aren’t specifically racial/racist/offensive is that they don’t want the worst people from both ends of the spectrum (both the biggest racist assholes and the most over-the-top ridiculously sensitive) to be able to set the agenda or claim ownership. It’s…

Terms can develop new meanings, lose old ones, or change in a million other ways. Just that fact that you have to inform people of the old meaning shows that the older meaning is no longer relevant to most people in day to day conversation. There was an older meaning (probably more than one), then your meaning, now…

“As an aside, what are you really fighting for when you demand to keep a word that a large group of people is bothered by, or that a group of experts finds pejorative?”

I’m not saying this in support or opposition to any specific terms here, but I’m always confused by the guys who try to use etymology as a reason to keep using a word. Language changes, always and forever. Terms can develop new meanings, lose old ones, or change in a million other ways. Just that fact that you have to…

“Why did you name the main directory ‘Daddy’?”

“Diva and backup_singer" is too much, I love it. And that you used the underscore is just *chef's kiss*. I still name files like this from a few Linux classes, and I'm not even a programmer.

As a recent discoverer of the Dresden files, I like “vampire & thrall”.

Somewhat similarly, the term “slave” did not originally have racial implications, as it existed before the modern concept of race. It derived from the ethnonym “Slav” (the Indo-European people).

This is interesting, because AFAIK the connotation of “black” being evil and “white” being good far predates the invention of race. So I rather doubt that “whitelist” and “blacklist” were originally intended with any sort of racial implication. (The opposite may be true: those espousing race theory may have selected…