Abrams has created for the most part very mediocre fare. That goes for all of his movies, really, and for everything he’s written or directed himself on TV, as well. Lost is a big exception, but that’s presumably because Lindeloff is a really good writer. Why anybody would think of Abrams as the next Spielberg is beyond me.
Bad Robot did produce some very good shows, especially the Jonathan Nolan ones.
There seems to be a couple of beliefs that run deep on the US that don’t over here:
I kinda get that when it comes to the US, because it’s so deeply connected to the American Dream and the vision Americans have of themselves. But how did this work so well over here? Look at the French, even after all these years of Macron’s neo-liberalism, they still aren’t really turning to the left (the left coalition’s success in the recent election is due to the election process, they lost the popular vote) and instead they’re about to succumb to LePen’s fascism. These are the people who invented the guilloutine, for God’s sake!
It’s a simpler narrative that has a bunch of stuff you can physically point to – all the foreign people working in visible sapces, more diversity on TV, and those are why things are bad, somehow.
I don’t know, man, I mean, what’s easier to point to than “Look! A handful of super-rich guys have all the money!!!”
It’s hard to understand for me that they somehow managed to steer the discourse in a way that makes sure nobody talks about wealth disparity and re-distribution.
The thing is that Trump is a symptom, not the problem. The US as a society has never really come to terms with race relations, which basically broke the Republicans when Obama got elected. Combine that with a refusal to properly support public services, the hollowing out of the middle class, the deliberate destruction of public education… You have a combination of an increasingly dysfunctional political system and people who are primed to flock to basically anything that offers a way out.
Yeah, the latter points are the same reason why Le Pen has been so successful in France, and the AfD in parts of Germany. If people feel like the system isn’t working for them anymore, why should they give a fuck about keeping it in place. It’s a bit of a mystery to me though why this hasn’t led to the rise of a new left wing the way it has to a new right. I mean, it’s not a mystery in the US, for the reasons described above, but in Europe it’s more inexplicable. People seem to be entirely wrapped up in the narrative that it’s the unemployed and migrants fucking everything up, instead of turning to class warfare. ‘s weird.
Trump showed that there is no depth the Republicans won’t plumb if they can win an election – and the person who comes after him will be as bad, if not worse. Because there are no consequences for it.
After this? Yes, very much so. That’s another reason why him winning is way worse than just any Republican candidate winning.
As for Republicans leaving no depths unplumbed… let’s not ignore that the Republican establishment is terrified of Trump. He’s the genie they summoned without realising it, and they have no way of putting him back in the bottle. The Christian right is happy as a pig in the mud right now, yes, but I there’s big parts of the GOP quaking in their boots.
More broadly, and to move it away from the personalised back-and-forth, I think what we’re really talking about here is an absolutist approach to policitcs rather than a consensus approach.
If I decided that I was only going to vote for a party that represented my interests and policy preferences precisely, I would probably never find that party (unless I started one myself) because large political groups don’t work like that – they end up agreeing policy through wider consensus.
Similarly, if legislators decided that they could only vote for legislation if it 100% represented their preferences, in every line and paragraph, then no legislation would ever get passed, because you couldn’t ever draft legislation that would fully satisfy everybody at the same time.
Those voters and legislators might feel proud that they had stuck to their principles, but nothing would get done.
Politics, when it works, tends to work through consensus rather than everybody feeling they’ve got exactly what they wanted. Does that mean you don’t always get everything you want? Of course. Does it mean you occasionally have to “hold your nose” and vote for the lesser of two evils? Yes, if you want the preferable outcome. But that’s a sensible decision if you want to have any influence over the direction in which politics moves.
Progressive voters deciding to withhold their vote and opt-out of the Democratic process absolutely plays into the hands of the other side, and allows politics to move in the opposite direction.
To be fair, I do understand Lorcan’s argument on a general level – that by supporting a supposedly-left party even when it moves away from everything it should represent, you encourage the direction they’re taking. There are fights about the directions of parties that will and should have an effect on elections. And I think generally, you can make the argument that sometimes, parties need to be made to understand that they’re going the wrong way by losing an election even when they still would’ve been the better alternative.
I think this argument could more easily be made in a US context if Trump wasn’t the alternative. With a “normal” Republican, as far as that’s a thing, it would’ve been more easily justifiable. It’d also make more sense if there was any hope of the Democrats getting the message and finally nominating one of their more leftist politicians in the future. But that is unfortunately very unlikely.
The whole thing is exascarbated by the two-party system. In Germany (and the UK, etc.), if I think the pabour party (SPD) sucks, I can either go further left (Die Linke), focus on ecological matters (Green Party), or now go even left-right-populist (Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht). And my vote will still matter because that party will be in parliament, and quite possibly in a government coalition. In the US, you don’t get that alternative.
Based on what? Seriously, is there any evidence that they’d even try to do anything?
Well, she announced this very clearly, and it’s not like it’d go against her record up to this point. There is no reason to believe she wouldn’t have tried to go for it. She’s tried to push for a bill like this before, after all.
As a U.S. senator, Harris opposed anti-abortion bills that would have conferred personhood rights on fetuses. None of them ultimately passed.
Conversely, Harris championed various bills that would have protected and advanced reproductive rights. In 2019, for example, Harris was a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have enacted a federal statutory right to abortion. It also did not pass.
They could try looking down-ballot where, to keep things on the topic of reproductive care, more people voted in favour of protecting abortion rights in states where it was on the ballot than they did for Harris. Polling shows time and again that policies the Democrats either downplay or ignore are popular with the people. But they won’t, say actually implement socialised helathcare because the political donor class doesn’t want it and the Democrats are fine with losing power so long as the money keeps rolling in.
I don’t think all Democrats are fine with it, but I also can’t say I entirely disagree. I think I would defend the Democratic Party to some extent here, but I don’t feel that’s necessary because the point is that while the Dems may not be what they should be, they at least don’t seek to actively punish and harm people who seek to end a pregnancy, or who are LGBT+ – and others. Voting for the lesser evil isn’t exactly inspiring, but not doing it when the actual evil is coming for you with sharpened knives is just… well, it’s not good for your own self-preservation, and none of the arguments you’ve been making has been able to see the logic of it, sorry.
Serious question Dave: If Harris had gotten in, what do you think she would have done about the state of abortion access in the US?
There is every reason to believe she would have done her best to reinstate a Roe-v-Wade kind of protection with legislation, as she’s said she would. Whether she would’ve been able to get that done is a different question, of course.
And nobody who refused to vote is fine with Trump being president. They’re checking out of the political system entirely because they realise neither side will help them.
Well, one side will do their best to really fuck them up though. And you can’t really check out of that. I mean, yeah, like you said, you can leave the US. But it’s not like the way the US goes doesn’t influence the rest of the world.
The Democrat policy for decades has been to not care about left-wing votes. Chuck Schumer literally said “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia” in 2016… you know, just before Clinton lost the election while pandering to the right. Not only did fewer of the Democrat base vote for Harris, but a whopping 4% of registered Republicans voted for her, down from 5% for Biden in 2020. If your voter base rejects your arguments and policies, I don’t see how that’s the voters’ faults and not the fault of the party’s arguments and policies.
Democrats do keep making that mistake, and I’m afraid they’ll once again take the wrong lesson from this election. But then again, what lesson are they supposed to take from it? When there’s a huge majority supporting Trump and his policies, including restricting access to abortion, deportations and anti-trans activism?
A lot of random action shots and very little sense of what the show will actually be about.
I wonder if the people who chose not to vote Democrat to send them a message this year are happy with the outcome that resulted from their choice. I would guess not, but who knows – maybe they think four more years of Trump is a price worth paying to send their message.
There’s also the questions of whether that message will be received, of course. Given that immensity of Trump’s win, the Democrats may well decide they need to move further to the right.
Meanwhile, in Germany, after the dissolution of our labour/green/neo-liberal government coalition, we are going to have an election in February and then a pretty right-wing CDU (conservative party) chancellor who accused refugees of only coming to Germany to get their teeth fixed and who twenty years ago introduced the term “Leitkultur” (lead culture – the idea that there is a true German cultural core that immigrants need to adapt to) into the political discourse.
Jim Abrahams, Comedy Writer-Director for ‘Airplane!’ & ‘Naked Gun’ Dies at 80
Oh wow, that’s a big one. Kentucky Fried movie and Airplane! were works of comedic genius at their time, and incredibly influential. Not necessarily in a good way – most movies that try to spoof the way those did in later years are really, really terrible. But that doesn’t change how good those originals were.
To be honest, I don’t think Biden pardoning Hunter is that big a problem.
There’s a number of problems with it really, but the most important one is: Biden demonstrated that he’s fine with some people – those in power – breaking the law and suffering no consequences whatsoever. In that, he is now no different than Trump. Which plays into the hands of those who already see the two big parties as interchangable and want someone like Trump to shake things up. And it also means that once again, people have been shown that “politicians are all the same” and they needn’t bother going out to vote at all.
As he said, the plea deal Hunter agreed to was torpedoed
Ah well, when a plea deal doesn’t work out obviously all you can do is just not prosecute somebody further. I bet there’s a lot of convicted people in the US who wish they’d had that choice.
I’d have pardoned him to avoid that too.
Right, because you’re fine with somebody stealing 1.4 million dollars from the people.
Well, like Tobias said, this is why separation of powers is a really good idea.
Interesting sidenote: The pardon doesn’t just cover the crimes he’s being accused of, but any and all he may have comitted in the year 2014. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.
Interesting that he’s the one to say this. I mean most people probably knew, but it’s impossible to say it.
I wonder why you would think that. All over Europe, parties are trying to capitalise on strong anti-immigration stances; there’s pretty much nobody who isn’t suggesting tougher and tougher anti-immigration policies, trying to top each other, including the supposedly political left.
Anyway: It all seems like a bunch of nonsense because it’s being connected to the cost of the asylum system while the aspect that Labour actually is taking aim at is businesses importing cheap labour (which the Tories apparently made very easy for them indeed) and keeping salaries low in that way.
In a week in which the Labour government clashed with business leaders over the national insurance increase, which has been dubbed a “jobs tax”, and the difficulties of getting people on benefits back into work, Sir Keir sent them a strong warning that he would not allow companies to continue to rely on cheap foreign labour.
He told reporters: “For too long we’ve had this over-reliance on the easy answer of recruiting from abroad, and that’s got to change. And it’s a two-way street.
Which, you know, fair enough, it’s pretty crazy how much UK immigration rose after Brexit. On the other hand, it’s mostly bullshit:
ONS estimates show two main explanations for the 660,000 increase in non-EU immigration that took place between 2019 and 2023 (Figure 3):
Work visas. Almost half of the increase in non-EU immigration from 2019 to 2023 resulted from those arriving for work purposes (21%) and their dependants (27%). Health and care was the main industry driving the growth, including care workers who received access to the immigration system in February 2022. There was also higher demand for some workers who were already eligible for visas under the old system, such as doctors and nurses. Early data for 2024 suggest that health and care work visas had fallen substantially, however.
International students and their dependants accounted for a further 39% of the increase in non-EU immigration. The UK has an explicit strategy of increasing and diversifying foreign student recruitment, and it is also likely that the reintroduction of post-study work rights post-Brexit made the UK more attractive to international students. The 2023 figures do not yet reflect the impact of restrictions on students’ family members, introduced in January 2024.
So a big part of the immigrants are in health labour, and if the UK is anything at all like Germany, they probably need nurses and healthcare workers desperately, and the other part of it are highly qualified workers who are also desperately needed by all European countries at the moment.
So yeah, apart from a legitimate point about social dumping somewhere in there, this is also the usual populism suggesting that Jonny Foreigner is leeching off the Great British society while it’s actually the people coming in keeping it all going while the native population is growing too old to do so anymore. But everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn’t Labour.
This has made national news over here recently: There is, it turns out, a tradition on the small island of Borkum that consists of a big celebration in which three men (who are decided by having a big fight or something) roam the streets at night in cow costumes and who hunt and then spank women (pretty violently) cow horns while being cheered on by the crowds.
Here’s the TV report with auto-translated subtitles. Around the 10-minute-mark you can see the video of the whole thing, and it’s exceedingly weird, like something from a folk horror movie.
Then there’s the whole matter of WW raping the guy Steve possessed.
Well, there’s also still the possibility that Steve actually took over his body permanently and kinda extinguished his soul, and when Steve leaves, all that remains is a braindead husk. In that case it wouldn’t be rape, it’d just be murder. That any better?
On the other hand, I saw The Substance yesterday and that was absolutely glorious. It’s a fucking amazing movie and if you haven’t seen it yet, bloody well go out and do so.
It’s Cronenbergian body horror meets media world satire, and it’s very secure in its aesthetics; the whole movie is shot beautifully disgustingly. It also does the Cronenberg approach very well. The story is a Darian-Gray-ish concept in which Demi Moore creates a younger version of herself who is still bound to the old body because she needs to take a fluid from it, and they have to switch every seven days and the other body kind of just lies around during that time. And if you’re not on time switching, well, terrible things start to happen.
The whole movie works fantastically well and I was quite happy with it, but in the last act (non plot-specific light spoiler, but I’ll blot it just in case) it switches gears and goes full Troma, which was utterly brilliant and unexpected.
So, yeah, watching how confidently and boldly that movies took on its themes of fading beauty and ageing women in a patriarchal society and turned it into something wonderful and stomach-turning was an absolutely great night out. Much recommended.
I saw Wonder Woman 1984 last week. It was bafflingly bad. They managed to make a movie in which nothing works. The dialogues are terrible, the characters are unconvincing, the CGI is bad (every time she uses the lasso it looks so bad it takes you right out of the movie), and the overall feel of the movie is more like a throwback to the kind of over-the-top silly superhero movies they tended to make in the eighties, which, yes, might be the point here, but the thing is, those weren’t very good and they certainly aren’t when you make one today. Also, the whole make-a-wish plot device is a horrible idea and Max is a 2D panto villain who for some reason then gets a whole dumb backstory and a son, but only so he can then go on to panto villain some more. And the one thing the movie should have going for it, which is that Gal Gadot was a pretty good Wonder Woman in some other movies and is absolutely beautiful of course, turns out to not matter because the movie exposes her as a very much less than good actress.
Pine and Pascal do the best they can with what they’re given, but man does that not make a difference. Wow. What an utter and complete failure of a movie.
Former Florida attorney general? She seems wildly overqualified for a Trump pick. We can only hope she makes up for it by being a truly horrible human being.
In 2018, Bondi joined with 19 other Republican-led states in a lawsuit to overturn the ACA’s bans on health insurance companies charging people with pre-existing conditions higher premiums or denying them coverage outright.[16]
…
Bondi opposed same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ rights issues on behalf of the state.[17]
…
In August 2018, while still serving as Florida Attorney General, Bondi co-hosted The Five on Fox News three days in a row while also appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.[20] Fox News claimed that the Florida Commission on Ethics had approved Bondi’s appearance on the program; however, the spokeswoman for the commission denied that, telling the Tampa Bay Times that no decision was made by the commission and that the commission’s general counsel did not make a determination whether or not Bondi’s appearance as a host violated the Florida Code of Ethics. The Tampa Bay Times described it as “unprecedented” for a sitting elected official to host a TV show.[20]
…
In 2011, Bondi also pressured two attorneys to resign who were investigating Lender Processing Services, a financial services company now known as Black Knight, following the robosigning scandal, as part of their work for Florida’s Economic Crime Division. After the resignations, Bondi received campaign contributions from Lender Processing Services, though she denied any quid pro quo.[24]
…
In 2013, Bondi also received criticism following a campaign donation from Donald Trump.[28] Prior to the donation, Bondi had received at least 22 fraud complaints regarding Trump University. A spokesperson for Bondi announced that her office was considering joining a lawsuit initiated by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, regarding tax fraud potential charges against Trump.[29][30] Four days later, a political action committee established by Bondi to support her re-election, And Justice for All, received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University. Both Bondi and Trump defended the propriety of the donation.[31][32]
Right, thumps up on that front, it seems. For a second there I was worried he’d nominated someone for Attorney General who wasn’t a criminal, but we’re good here.
Well, yes. But it’s interesting that there’s enough power left in the non-Trump GOP that they can touch any of Trump’s choices at all. Up to this point, I’d have thought he could’ve nominated an ape in a suit and they’d swallow it.
The weird thing is that there’s so much good Star Wars content out there. If they’d gone the Marvel route of just taking the best of the comics, novels, games etc. and loosely adapt them, they would’ve been fine.
Still, I’ll take a look at Skeleton Crew.
I mean, if that’s what this season of America is going to be, alright. Let’s get the popcorn out.
Well fuck, I’ve been invited to meetings where they’ll explain how the world copied itself and we’re living in an alternate timeline (my words, I’m not fucking going) and on it goes.
Ohhhhh I kinda want to go to that!
Honestly, I think the best you can do is, if you like them, to keep engaging these people on other levels so they won’t become isolated from mainstream society. That’s when the true descent into madness begins. As long as you’re not going there, I don’t know man. Personally, believing in religions doesn’t seem any less crazy to me than the other shit.
“Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. […]
The announcement comes as Trump has called for retribution against numerous adversaries, calling for the arrest of figures like special counsel Jack Smith and suggesting others should be prosecuted.
That is so, so funny.
Kinberg, eh? “Hey, remember that guy who crashed the X-Men franchise? We should totally get that guy to revive Star Wars!”
That graffity Cybertruck actually looks cool for once. Like something out of Mad Max. They should just go ahead and sell it like that, pre-graffitied.
I don’t think O’Rourke has the momentum anymore. He already tried to go for this once, and he’s lost the last two elections he took part in (senate and governor). I mean, yes, this was Texas of course, but at some point it becomes a hard sell when you can’t point to having won anything in the last decade.
Well, that was a rambly review that frequently had more interested in being snarky than in the show it was reviewing.
Still, so there’s some good and some bad about the show. I’ll definitely watch some of it when it hits some streaming service over here (there’s still no HBO over here).
Assuming we’ll still have a democracy after the next four years, who should be considered for the Democratic presidential candidate?
I don’t see anyone who’s currently properly on the stage. Warren and Sanders are too old, and women and PoC won’t get a chance after Harris’ failure. Of the people who were thrown around as candidates before they settled on Harris, Gavin Newsom is probably who they would go with now. Or one of the other white dudes. But I think it’ll probably be a whole new ballgame after those four years.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, they had zombie-like aliens for the first Avengers movie and for the Guardians movies (so Gunn could do his splatter thing). But, I mean, that’s only to be expected.
Now I’m thinking of that crashed car scene in Wild at Heart, and of that wonderful deer accident scene in Straight Story.
Gotta rewatch Wild at Heart one of these days.
Politicians
Good speech. Here are some important quotes:
Many political experts and D.C. insiders are already blaming President Joe Biden’s economic agenda for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss. This does not stand up to scrutiny. Even though the Biden economy produced strong economic growth while reining in inflation, incumbent parties across the globe have been tossed out by voters after the pandemic. American voters also showed support for Democratic economic policies, for example, approving ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage in Alaska and to guarantee paid sick leave in Missouri.
But good economic policies do not erase painful underlying truths about our country. For my entire career, I’ve studied how the system is rigged against working-class families. On paper, the U.S. economy is the strongest in the world. But working families are struggling with big expenses like the cost of housing, health care, and childcare. Giant corporations get tax breaks and favorable rules while workers are gouged by higher prices. Billionaires pay paltry taxes on their wealth while families can’t afford to buy their first homes.
Americans do not want a country where political parties each field their own team of billionaires who then squabble over how to divvy up the spoils of government. Vice President Harris deserves credit for running an inspiring campaign under unprecedented circumstances. But if Democrats want to earn back the trust of working people and govern again, we need to convince voters we can—and will—unrig the economy.
I’ll say it one more time, I wish they’d gone with Warren in 2020.
Damn,that’s no age. I loved the original Candyman. RIP.
In a democracy you have to be able to get enough people on your side.
My point exactly. Apparently, what the majority of people in the US want is to bully and demean and humiliate the weak. To exploit and to steal whatever you can. To laugh at human values and empathy.
That is what Trump showed them. That is what got people on his side.
I think voters just didn’t really like Harris. People who voted for Obama twice didn’t see it in her. Democrats don’t have a good candidate and they lack a positive vision for the future.
That shouldn’t really matter when the alternative is a monster, though. This is a victory of bullying, of meanness, of open rejection of lawfulness and decency on every level.
US members – I’m sorry for your guys. Hope the next years won’t be too bad.
More than half of those are characters that are unlikely to appear in YA, or ever again. But yeah, they certainly have enough young – and legacy – characters for a team at this point.
It’s crazy that the right wing is jumping on that. Yeah killing the squirrel is fucked up, but the right is way worse with animal welfare, animals in agriculture, wildlife, etc
Huh. I hadn’t heard about this. What a weird story.
But I do get why the right is jumping on that. It’s not about the animal as such (they don’t give a fuck about animal welfare), it’s the idea of the government coming in and taking and killing your pet.
And really, it’s kinda fucked up that they did that. This squirrel has been living with a guy for years, how is it supposed to get rabies? Even if there’s a rule that you have to test for rabies when somebody’s been bitten, you should know when not to follow the rules, especially when it’s clear that you’ll hurt somebody badly (not the squirrel, the guy).
The way this should’ve gone is, they take the damn squirrel, the guy gets a lecture on why you shouldn’t fuck with wildlife, pays a hefty fine and has to talk about the issue on his bloody squirrel channel, and then you just leave him alone. Taking away an animal somebody really loves and killing it is not a good thing to do, even if it’s technically the right thing to do.
I enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher, so I decided to finally watch Midnight Mass. It’s very well done. It takes a lot of time to build its little island world before anything much starts to happen at all, but you don’t mind that at all because the characters and their dynamics are very involving, and it also manages to very slowly build a creepy atmosphere that becomes quite unnverving. And in the centre of this, Hamish Linklater as the town’s new pastor is really unnverving. He’s really great in that role.
Uh, I didn’t really know anything going in, so a few spoilers in tags now:
One thing that’s a bit of a shame is that you can see from the start that everybody very old is just a younger person in make-up (who often also over-acts being old), so you directly know that part of the plot will involve everybody getting younger.
The moment of reveal of who he is and that it’s actually a vampire show is very neat though, and I look forward to the next steps. It’s been ages since I’ve watched anything that managed to build a really creepy Stephen-King-esque atmosphere, much less in a vampire story. And I’m enjoying that a lot.
Burning ballot boxes and more intimidation at election centers:
Things are feeling really, really tense at this point. Fuck, only a few days to go. Man.
How surprising!!!
In all seriousness, it’d be cool if this movie was historically accurate in the details, but who the hell would have expected it to be?
Daredevil looks good. Everything else, who the fuck knows.
Taken from another thread:
“I didn’t realise that.”
The spelling of realize seemed odd to me, but was wondering if Ive always been wrong.
So I looked it up.The correct spelling of the word is “realize” in American and Canadian English, and “realise” in British, Australian, and New Zealand English.
Same for Finalize and Finalise.
I never realized that!
Oh yeah, that’s a thing. Personally, I’m particular to the British spelling.
(I’ve also seen fellow English teachers mark one variation as mistakes because apparently they also don’t know about this.)
Forgot that I wanted to mention that Kaos is also a great example for how to make a diverse cast really work. You’ve got color-blind casting for one thing, which works great because it just doesn’t give a fuck what ethnicity the characters have – it’s a bit like the theatre works in that way. And then, you’ve got a character whose being trans-gender is actually an important part of the story that doesn’t feel tacked on but really works for the story, and you’ve got an actor with a disability with Daedalus and that isn’t a part of the story, it’s just never mentioned, and it also works completely fine. And so on.
Jesus. Does he also sell supplements?
Trump did a tweet on his truth social network about the Armenians that fled from Nagorno Karabakh, interesting. In 2023 100,000 Christians were ethnically cleansed in an Islamic country and nobody gave a shit.
Wow, you really hadn’t heard of this conflict until Trump told you about it? I mean, the Nagorno-Karabakh war was criminally underreported, I completely agree, but that’s still a bit surprising.
As for nobody giving a shit, yes, this should have been far bigger in the media. But it’s not like the human rights NGOs didn’t sound the alarms, and it’s not like there were no political reactions, and it’s not like those of us who do try to have some awareness of the world didn’t know about it and didn’t pay attention. Fuck, System of a Down released to songs about this conflicts in 2020.
The big problem with this conflict is that Turkey is backing Azerbaijan and Russia used to kind of protect Armenia, but then some years ago withdrew that protection to a large extent (due to setting their sights on different targets, presumably, or as a result of their then-new coalition with Turkey. Possibly also to punish Armenia for being EU-curious, because if you’re interested in that, Russia will destroy you, as they have amply demonstrated recently). So now Armenia has nobody to back them militarily, because that would mean a conflict with both Russia and Turkey, and the EU can’t afford the former and didn’t want to commit to the latter before the Ukraine invasion – and now Ukraine just is the bigger fish. So everybody does their best to just look away and act like nothing’s happening, not unlike they all did with the Krim invasion a few years ago.
So yes, the Armenians are fucked, once again. It’s a fucking disgrace and horrible, but it’s not like it is so much different from the way the Kurds are fucked in Rojava and just in general, which is also criminally underreported and somehow I doubt that Trump gives a shit about them.
Because he, and then you, didn’t put this in terms of ethnicity, or politics, or nationality, or history. For you, apparently, this is only relevant because it is a criminal war of one religion against another – the one you and Trump are a part of. Well, I hope this isn’t true for you, but I know it is for Trump. Well, no, I actually don’t. I don’t think he gives a shit either way. But he knows what his audience wants.
Watched all of Kaos now and I’m a bit pissed off Netflix didn’t give it a second season. I really liked it a lot. Great casting, for one – Goldblum as Zeus was a stroke of genius. Of course casting Goldblum is always kind of genius, but I don’t think the whole show would’ve worked as well without his weirdly magnetic presence. But there are other great performances, too – the trailers didn’t even show David Thewlis, so that was a happy surprise, and Stanley Townsend is fantastic as Minos (you can tell he comes from a theatre background, he’s got an incredible presence). And Eddie Izzard as one of the fates was also a nice surprise.
I also just loved how they re-told the story, taking the building blocks quite faithfully while also changing them wherever they felt like it. It all felt very firmly rooted in antiquity while also being very current. And the presence of Prometheus as narrative voice worked very well, and the dialogues were really good overall. It really is a shame it won’t be continued. But at the same time, it also kind of works as an ending – this could have been the first book in a trilogy, so to speak, but it also works as a standalone, for me. Because the story as it was set up really is kind of completed; you can see the rest of the prophecy working out from here.
Yeah, this is probably the best-case scenario. Hope they’ll make a good last episode, then.
Definitely sounds familiar.
Yeah, that rings a bell.
Disgusting…
I think when we look back at this in a decade or so, many countries will be very ashamed at how long they kept supporting Netanyahu’s actions.
DC reveals the return of Vertigo
That’s cool. Obviously, they shouldn’t have let it die in the first place. Let’s hope they do something worthwhile with it this time around. The Nice House is a good start, certainly.
I don’t think many people would claim that liberal attitudes are “natural”. Currently, it has become very clear that they may actually not even be as mainstream as we used to think they were, with large parts of the population – and not the ones your comment was aimed at – rejecting them and trying to push for a more reactionary model of society.
Payne died Wednesday evening, CNN reports, with several witnesses saying he fell from a third-floor balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Authorities are still investigating the nature of Payne’s death.
Jesus.
Yeah, other international leaders jumped on this to talk about how now there’s a chance for peace, but we all know that there isn’t.
While I would agree that the sacrifices should currently mainly be made on the different end of the spectrum – like, how many yachts and cars does a single person really need? – you would think that stopping the end of civilisation as we know it would be in most people’s interest.
you can’t demand people give up even more, to stop
the temperature from changing a few degrees.their children from living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Edited for clarity.
Eh, I can’t say I’m entirely unconcerned by climate change – but it’s not my main concern.
Not yet. Give it another decade or two and it will be. Only then it’ll be too late to do anything about it.
Didn’t your greens get rid of nuclear plants? Personally I would be against that, I think nuclear can play a positive role.
Nah, the Greens always were in favour of shutting them down, but it was Merkel and her conservative government who did it. After Fukushima. But I am generally in favour of getting out of nuclear; I can see the arguments for it – obviously – but you can’t replace one unsolvable problem with another. And you shouldn’t, when there’s actual solutions you can use.
Green politics here is mostly a thing for rich white libs with luxury beliefs, the consequences of which don’t really affect them. Not sure if it’s the same in Germany, so I can’t judge that.
That only works if you believe that climate change won’t primarily affect the least wealthy. Which it will.
It’s funny that the lower-to-middle-income classes have let themselves be convinced that it’s too expensive to fix our breaking the world, but that it’s at the same time unrealistic to touch the rich’s incomes and wealth to sustain our societies.
I am wary of this “degrowth” agenda that at least part of the green movement seems to have. I think it could hurt a lot of poor people. I am not even sure if it really is left wing.
Yeah, I don’t see how degrowth can work in a capitalist system. But the thing we actually can, and desperately need to, do right now is to at least switch to more sustainable energies and materials. To just keep going while the climate is radically changing all around us is insane to an extent that I find that position very hard to relate to.
Well, some are and some aren’t. Somehow it often seems like the wrong ones end up in power.
Over here, the Green Party has made every effort to do the right things, but they’re being sabotaged at every step by the neo-liberals in the coalition.
Finally saw this and yeah, it was very enjoyable but not exactly captivating. It’s just a sequence of gags, cameos and action sequences and while all of that is quite well done, there’s no plot or character journey to speak of (yes, Wolverine and DP supposedly do have their journeys, but they don’t really connect because it’s all very superficial).
That said, it’s just a fun movie to watch and even one I might rewatch at some point. There’s a lot of great moments.
Watching The Rings of Power, and I don’t really know why. Way less enthused about season 2 than Ben seems to be; it’s more of the same to me, as of this point (ep 4). Which means to say, it’s pretty mediocre fantasy.
*sigh*
You know, doubts about Starmer aside, I suspect that Labour in Britain is in a similar situation as the current German-Labour-equivalent-led coalition government in Germany has been in the last few years: The conservative government that was in power in Germany for decades under Merkel has run the country so far into the ground that there is just too much to fix. It would need huge investments to do that, and the money just isn’t there.
So our bridges are crumbling, the public transport system is falling apart (as the recent football cup here demonstrated to the whole world) and everything in bureaucracy takes forever because there isn’t enough manpower there. And while this is all the former government’s fault, the current one is being blamed for not fixing it fast enough and the CDU will be back in power after the next election.
https://www.thelocal.de/20240911/bridge-partially-collapses-in-germanys-dresden
You sure do. But I in the absence of that, I don’t see what’s supposed to be inhuman about an easily accessible warm place to sleep.
I mean, it may not be ideal that at roughly the same time, we also have the news about the Swiss suicide pod…
Plans to impose value-added tax on private school fees, announced in Labour’s election manifesto and due to come into force in January, may have to be delayed to prevent administrative problems, aides said, confirming a report in the Observer newspaper on Sunday.
Reeves is also reconsidering a planned overhaul of the UK’s tax regime for non-domiciled foreigners, looking at different policy options to maximize the tax take after suggestions it would spark a wealth exodus and end up losing money for the Treasury.
Private Equity
Further proposals to close a loophole on carried interest — private equity fund managers’ portion of profits on asset sales — are being looked at again after internal Treasury analysis showed they too could end up costing the exchequer money.
So the rich are threatening to flee if they have to pay proper taxes, what else is new? Fuck them, I hope Labour doesn’t get cowed by their empty threats.
Unfortunately, it does end on a bit of a cliffhanger.
Ah crap.
I’m still going to see it when I re-activate my Netflix account for a bit, but honestly at this point, it’s like Dave says – Netflix aren’t building any shows that I am particularly interested in anymore, so the time period when I do have a Netflix account grow shorter and shorter. I’ll have a month to watch Kaos and… well, right now I wouldn’t even know what else to watch there. Finish Baby Reindeer, I suppose.
Haven’t seen it yet, but it seemed like the kind of show that’d be fine as a one-off.
Apparently they thought about doing it as a broadway show at some point. Should’ve gone with that.
I read some of the relaunch Matt Kindt books, and they were pretty decent.
I found them browsing the amazon unlimited comic books available, but finding things there is driving me crazy. I know people here complained of whatever happened with comixology, but I was never on that – I don’t think I was able to access it here in Germany anyway. Anyway, amazon unlimited sucks for finding books. I have to browse through dozens of pages of cheap AI-created porn to find a good book here and there. I wish this was curated in some way, but right now it’s either doing random searches in the hope that some author’s books are currently on there, or leafing through piles of wet shit to fish for pearls.
I love that. Surely these days, someone can make it real with AI?
Floppie à Deux.
Sorry, some guy on X made that joke a month ago.
https://x.com/EmenaIo/status/1831482139084554718
You know, I think it’s far easier to explain Joker 2’s lack of success than Joker 1’s success.
The shitty one! :)
The one directed by David Ayer. It’s one of the films I can’t stop thinking about, because it’s totally fascinating, since every part of it is really bad. Nothing that happens in it makes sense. Each scene seems to be written by someone who hadn’t been told what happened in the previous scene.
(And if Superman becomes homicidal, who thinks that a small crazy woman with a baseball bat is going to stop him?)
The one directed by James Gunn is good, but not great.
Agreed on all counts!
My Facebook friends who have seen it have not been kind to it. A lot of them said it doesn’t make sense. One of them walked out of the theater after an hour. Definitely waiting for cable/streaming to attempt to watch it.
I suspect it’s a movie you can enjoy if you go into it in the right mindset. It seems like a pretty unique experience, whatever else it may be.
The earliest use I can find is from April:
Is Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Turning Into a Megaflopolis?
Assuming you would possess the traditional strengths and weaknesses, which would you rather be: A vampire or a werewolf?
For me, it would be werewolf. You are basically normal except for one night about every four weeks, during the night of the full moon. You can actually plan around that night. You can pretty much have a normal life.
Vampire, no question about it. Why? Because vampires are sexy! Whereas werewolves are stinky and ugly.
vs.
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Basically we’re unable to make any decision that helps us. We will continue to struggle on as everything gets worse and ultimately falls apart.
What I tell myself is, at least things are going to get really interesting up to that point. Well, and afterwards. We’re finally living in the future of the sci-fi novels of our youth, unfortunately it’s mostly the darker ones.
Being shittier than Suicide Squad is next to impossible!
Which one we talking about now?
