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Stephen could have been speaking for me when he talked about why he won’t ever vote for Trump, but it is never a good idea to mess with Texas – that is a scientific fact ;)
The National Debt would be a great band name. “We’re getting bigger every day!”
The design talk was excellent. It made this one of your best shows yet. (Yeah, yeah, of course I do design work. Why do you ask?)
Buckaroo Banzai and Big Trouble in Little China are great movies. You’ll have plenty of support on that around here, including one of the mods who has a cat named Jack Burton, right @juliesnapp?
You even managed to make the Trump-talk worth listening to.
Now, on the barbecue, I don’t think you managed to stir up enough people, so you’ll have to talk about chili and allowable pizza toppings in the next show to really gen up the hate.
I think the movie, Annihilation, deserved to fail.
It’s one of those films where you have to turn off your critical faculties entirely. In the last analysis, it’s a horror movie, so people – especially women – have to behave like idiots, to get themselves eaten by monsters as the script requires.
The five women scientists are totally inept at operating in a dangerous wilderness environment, even though some of them are alleged to have military backgrounds.
Something grabs one of the five under the water, and the other four immediately drop their rifles and all jump into the water – instead of, say, two jumping in the water to help out, and the other two holding their rifles at the ready and watching out for something to shoot.
They are attacked by a giant mutant crocodile which they just barely manage to kill. Minutes later we see them in little tiny boats on the water, just as if they had read ahead in the screenplay and therefore know they don’t have to worry about more crocodiles.
They find a safe place to sleep, in an old tower. Their leader takes the first watch, but inexplicably decides to watch a) from the ground, b) at some distance from the tower, and c) with lights turned on so she can’t see in the dark. This is all to set up having one of the scientists carried off by a mutant bear — after she descends from the tower for no good reason.
Their goal is a lighthouse on the shore. I don’t think the film ever explains why they spend a week slogging through the jungle, instead of taking a boat and getting there in a couple of hours. Nor do they ever explain why the scientists are so sure the lighthouse contains the answers to everything. Again, the characters appear to have read the screenplay!
“The United States is the most conservative it’s ever been legislatively in a hundred years.”
That qualifier matters a rather lot, doesn’t it? Legislatively. America has an enormously powerful civil society. The government cannot ban you from the labor market, but civil society can. Remember, civil society isn’t just institutions like churches, but college campuses, the “independent” media, Hollywood, etc. If enough civil actors gang up to strip someone of his/her rights, that person has no recourse to fight back.
Civil actors are also extremely good at silencing dissent. I still remember, as do most other young white men my age I think, the way the labor market treated us from ~2010 to ~2014 or so. We by and large weren’t allowed to complain. That was a function of civil society.
It matters who controls the heights of civil society. We can’t use the power of the state to change that, but that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. For example, in Hungary, Orban’s cronies have bought up all the opposition media outlets. GOP donors could do something similar here in America. We could tax Hollywood more stringently, write a few of those “Dear Collegue” letters suggesting, ever so politely, that all publicly funded universities close what are, really, publicly subsidized hate groups (the various “studies departments”). Etc.
Salad Emoji’s are IMPORTANT, and as a shareholder, I am always extremely happy to hear that a company I have shares in is expending resources on these efforts!