Yeah: gotta be crisis actors, if Alex Jones taught us anything, right?

One of the most on the nose scenes in the Wire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6r2a2PaQPI

The conversation (copied from IMDB)

Detective James 'Jimmy' McNulty : Guy leaves two dozen bodies scattered all over the city, no one gives a fuck.

Detective Lester Freamon : It's because who he dropped.

Detective William 'Bunk' Moreland : True that. You can go a long way in this country killin' black folk. Young males especially. Misdemeanor homicides.

Detective James 'Jimmy' McNulty : If Marlo was killin' white women...

Detective Lester Freamon : White children.

Detective William 'Bunk' Moreland : Tourists.

Detective James 'Jimmy' McNulty : One white ex-cheerleader tourist missin' in Aruba.

Detective William 'Bunk' Moreland : Trouble is, this ain't Aruba, bitch.

Detective Lester Freamon : You think that if 300 white people were killed in this city every year, they wouldn't send the 82nd Airborne? Negro, please.

Note the publication year of the article, and the year of the data collected. 2005 and 2002, respectively. Trucks and SUVs are demonstrably larger and more prevalent on the roads in the last twenty years in the US, and those were pre smartphone.

And plenty of us ride motorcycles for commuting and economic reasons, they're not only toys... Even if it is a vehicle that attracts a bunch of assholes, which I'll clearly admit

Right? No childish nicknames, no rage-fueled late night social media posting, no off kilter diatribes during an unrelated speech. He's just, transparently cool with a child trafficker. It is so mind numbingly damning I'm split between being horrified and fascinated by how his supporters refuse to connect any dots.

But...if you think free public university is a good thing...isn't not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying "folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it's legal Federally"? IMHO people shouldn't have these loans in the first place.

If we can't afford loan forgiveness, we can't afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.

Fascinating, isn't it? Does he think the Democrats just "hate all things fossil" so much that there's some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?

It's truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just...fascinating

Yeah, I'm not mad at my Iranian friends because of what their leaders do. I can't blame them for not starting a bloody uprising. It requires coordinated, collective action, and religious leaders and the uber rich work together to keep true change from happening. The same goes for the USA. Propaganda works, and it's keeping the people too divided to easily take serious action.

We need to help make change possible, not only chastise people for being trapped in oppressive systems.

Unfortunately they'll probably just say they are meant to be the masters of a harem and kill any potential rival males. Literally troglodyte shit

It's exactly like the plan with Medicaid: burdensome bullshit paperwork makes people either just stop trying, or resent the government...making it far easier to reduce the capability of already meager social programs even further.

More than I realized. As a kid, my favorite of the original trilogy was ROTJ. It had everything - an opening where the heroes got vengeance on a big slug, there was a dramatic-looking Death Star, speeder bikes, and force lightning.

My father told me (years later), how much some folks hated it for some of the same things. Rehashing the Death Star, Han accidentally killing Boba Fett (this hyped up bounty hunter that in the previous movie was clever and even mouthed off to Vader himself), Ewoks being cuddly teddy bears with janky traps, Leia being yet another Skywalker out of nowhere...basically, a lot of the same goofy shit people railed on George for in the prequels (myself included: since these conversations with my dad came up because I was a teenager complaining about Jar Jar, Yoda ping ponging around, etc.).

Later I saw that plenty of folks complained about ESB being moodier, the "No, I am your father" being a twist out of nowhere and dramatically undermining Obi-Wan's character by his being dishonest. Some of the same "canon-breaking" retcons that we all complain about today.

Granted...I still love ROTJ despite its flaws, and while I never enjoyed the prequels as much as a lot of folks, I find them endearing in an odd kind of way. The Sequel Trilogy less so, but there's a few bright spots.

Basically, I wonder what the reception of the movies would have been if we had the internet then, and especially if we had engagement-based algorithms driving things, which does such a great job of amplifying hate.

Military industrial complex

Climate change denial. That's the biggest thing for me: they apologized, but it took fifteen years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManBearPig

I never jived much with the general nihilism and both/all sides-ism I felt from it, which is probably unfair given it's meant to be a crass comedy.

Note what kind of car the bell is on

See also: politically correct (PC) and social justice warrior (SJW)...all just fancy ways to call someone a commie pinko bleeding heart socialist. The Red Scare never really stopped, and neither did the Lavender Scare

Something that's stuck with me for a long time is this quote within a quote about Susan Sontag:

"She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction."

-Kurt Vonnegut

https://inthesetimes.com/article/susan-sontag-and-arthur-miller

To add to this, there's a great section in Man Without a Country by Vonnegut where he talks about his approach to humor, and he mentions the time he was in Dresden during WW2 as a prisoner of war, while it was being bombed.

True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.

While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight." Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

A bigger part of the section here: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/kurt-vonnegut-1/excerpt-from-a-man-without-a-country

...or now is the time to leave while/if you can. Maybe they've decided they can fight the regime more effectively from outside the country. That they can use their voice and experience unburdened by fear they'll be arrested. What do you suggest they do that they can't from Canada?

Truly, I can't fault people for leaving. Especially people that are being targeted. I'm a scientist that works fighting against climate change, so I get it.

Him not being the Spock we know is kind of the point though, right?

He was a little messier before he got himself together. His human side maybe is less bound by Pon Farr rules, and he's not yet the hyper competent officer we love in his later years.

He screws up and then that becomes a motivating reason to control himself is pretty compelling, to me at least. He did go a little buck wild helping out Pike in TOS, so he's certainly still got a wild streak in him.

I imagine a lot of shit teachers keep their jobs simply because there's usually not a huge pool of candidates for replacements. Higher wages would help fix that issue, too!

Well yeah, that's exactly the idea. Choose the best of bad options, and try to improve things so that the next time there's better options.

Not choosing either usually leads to the worse option, which makes it harder to improve things.

There are no easy options.