the first positive conversation I've ever had with door-to-door proselytizers

Last night three young mormon women on their mission came by while we were making dinner, but they almost spent NO time trying to convert me because they were all American, and I was literally the first door they knocked on, so they were like "No way? You're American too?!" and we kinda just chatted for ten minutes or so. I haven't talked to any Americans in quite a while (except my family in video chats).

I asked about them getting sent to Finland and how that happened and what it was like for them so far and told them I've seen plenty of Jehovah's Witnesses going door to door but never had any mormons knock here before, and all of them were excited to be in Finland and all of them were planning to take a vacation in St Petersburg while they're here - there's like a 72-hr cruiseship one apparently, which is short enough that you don't need a visa - I didn't know that. (In the last five years or so I've come around to thinking it's not worth it to try to go to Russia, but St Petersburg has a reputation for art, literature, culture, and beautiful architecture, as well as liberal culture, and I've been wanting to see it since long before then, and it was the hometown of several of my classmates in the advanced Finnish class I took 5 years ago - hearing about it from their POV only increased the interest).

Also while we were talking Snookums came and tried to escape into the hallway and I picked him up - he went limp like a ginger sack of potatoes, as usual (and as dictated in the Cornish rex breed requirements for show cats), but then when I had him settled on my hip and he noticed three large strangers in front of him he panicked and tried to flail backwards over my elbow. As usual everyone was charmed and asked about him, so I got to tell the Actually his legal name is Russel [sic] Crowe story.

And after that I was hearing sizzling & thinking I needed to get back to cooking, and I managed to cut them off with handshakes at the "But have you ever thought about what God could add to your life?" point. Overall, a pleasant experience for me, although since they are novices, they are no doubt going to practice harder to push past the initial "Yes and let me stop you there because I definitely am not ever gonna change my mind about my spiritual beliefs no hard feelings" point (all the Jehovah's Witnesses I've met have steamrollered over at least three attempts to say that).

Mission Impossible: Sinister Nordics

Saving this here because it doesn't belong on Tumblr.
Mission Impossible, as a universe, is peculiarly fixated on Nordic and Scandinavian people going off the deep end and becoming international terrorists.

• MI: Fallout: Kristoffer Joner’s Nils Debruuk (Norwegian) thinks global cataclysm is the only way to destroy the ‘global order’ of evil organized governments (he doesn’t say anything about capitalism so he might just not like corruption… or the patriarchy??… or maybe he’s a libertarian). Bonus: random plutonium dealer “The European” played by Danish JFK-lookalike Caspar Phillipson
  


• MI: Rogue Nation: Jens Hulden’s rogue intelligence operative Janik Vinter (Swedish) wants to torture Tom Cruise (but fails) in the service of The Syndicate, a group dedicated to destroying the field of international espionage apparently.
  


• MI: Ghost Protocol: Michael Nyqvist’s Kurt Hendricks (Swedish), nuclear expert, decides that nuclear cataclysm will produce, uh, more… equality? Or something? His right-hand man is Samuli Edelman’s Wistrom (he’s Finnish, presumably playing Swedish).
  

Obviously they’ve successfully avoided racism, but that’s like saying that because someone is allergic to chocolate you’re serving avocado mousse for dessert. Like, you CAN make a dessert out of avocado, arguably a good one, but it’s kind of strange, almost nobody has heard of it before, and there were a lot of other non-chocolate desserts that come to mind before it. Similarly the world is not only full of other countries and causes, but there are even other terrorists out there.

It looks more like they also didn’t want to stir up any political associations with any known [so-called] terrorist organizations, not even, like, “animal rights activists”, which have made a ludicrously oversized appearance in media in the past for such a small niche. But even though that cause isn’t explicitly ethnic, national, or related directly to any form of real-world oppression (if you don’t count colonialist ‘activists’ attempting to cut off indigenous peoples from their traditional foods and livelihoods), it’s still possibly going to offend someone, namely, animal rights activists and sympathizers, the latter of whom are pretty numerous.

And if you’ve eliminated extant terrorist causes, inventing a new one is… um… well… a thing that has happened before without ruining the movie.

But one might still ask, “Why is this series in the spy genre - previously considered quaintly antiquated since the Reagan years, yet now suddenly super relevant to our news cycle - suddenly all counter-terrorism, when you can get counter-terrorism anywhere from NCIS: Anaheim to CSI: Toronto?”

(It IS ironic that the wave of “terrorist” trope in crime and action fiction after 9/11 was almost entirely politically motivated, racist, and agenda-driven, and frequently literally supported by the US military-industrial complex - check how often procedural shows thank a branch of the US military in the credits! - but these movies couldn’t have less interest in that particular cause.)

Of course, there’ve always been plenty of diabolical scientists who wanted to blow up the world or whatever in spy fiction too, but there also used to be some actual state-vs-state international espionage.

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