Deadlines? What Deadlines?

8 hours ago, JGP said:

 

Hard to imagine a head of two week old lettuce wouldn’t knock Drumpf the fuck out.

He’d be shockingly white. You don’t think he bronzes all over? Goddamn Elon raised to the power of Elon. 

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. 

2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

You don't know she's secretly a follower of the Ewok religion?

Oh yeah, right? He's basically a deity now so, yeah.

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

He’s always been a fucking liar and his advocates attempt to spin his fundamental dishonesty as some sort of admirable quality.  These morons say “if you ain’t cheaten you ain’t trying… “ with no irony intended.

:vomit:

And this is what his fans love about him. The audacity of the lie is the point; not whether or not he's telling the truth. Pwning the libs and all that. 

31 minutes ago, horangi said:

Doesn't the completionist in you demand just one more episode?

Nope. Maybe if I'm super bored and I have 45 minutes to kill. Otherwise I'll just watch highlights.

5 hours ago, sifth said:

Well that was an episode...............were we suppose to feel something when C3-P0 showed up?

She stands?!? Mon Mothma stands when C3P0 enters a room?

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I was going to comment on the latest episode but no. I'm done. I so wanted to like this but I just don't; and now I just don't care. 

Based on the (utterly baffling) reaction from fans and critics, I get that this puts me in a tiny minority. And there is a possibility that I could revisit this someday and fall in love with it, because that's happened before too. But for the time being, no, I'm out. 

Anyone think he's got that kind of cash sitting around?

Still no where near where we were during our 4th wave, but still trending in the wrong direction. We’ve seen how fast this can move when it starts rolling the wrong way.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9968619/alberta-covid-hospitalizations-up-since-july-health-minister/amp/

ETA: Do you think anyone actually remembers how fast this can move when it starts rolling the wrong way?

The Great Escape. Classic.

Looking at his filmography, he's also done some voice work for animation. He was the voice of Alfred Pennyworth in some pretty decent DC animated films. 

“G” in Quebec. PG in the rest of Canada. Because sometimes we don’t get so hysterical about this stuff. 

Gee, if only there was some kind of system where some people watch the movie and give it a number or a letter grade that corresponds to an age group or something…

When I was like, five? Maybe six? I saw Alec Guinness cut off a guys arm in a bar fight. 

A fantasy film with no nudity, little to no profanity, and no drug references. The kids can handle it. 

Golly, for a movie that "isn't about anything", it sure is generating a hell of a lot of discussion. 

To be perfectly clear, when I said, "I honestly don’t know what to make of it... I'm not exactly sure what it was trying to do...", that may well be a limitation in me, not a fault with the film. 

I think @mormont's take is pretty good. 

17 minutes ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

Which I noted, and may be the case with Ike. It's been awhile since I read all this stuff but pretty sure there was a decent amount of contemporary corroboration for the those sentiments among top brass in 1945.  

Really, I'm pretty sure even MacArthur is documented saying it was a bad idea, horrifying and unnecessary, etc. at the time.  

I've wondered about how the cold war plays out too.  But there is a decent amount of evidence that the consensus at the time was NOT that nuking Japan would be the best move in the Trolley Problem.  

Wasn’t there an order shortly after forbidding US military people from publicly criticizing the bombings? Because that would be a distortion too. 

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The film is feminist and rightly engages with the complicated relationship between Barbie and feminism and the ways in which that reflects the development of feminist thought in a patriarchal society. But that's the B plot, not the A plot. The A plot is existentialist, not feminist. The movie explicitly recognises that patriarchy is just a way of trying to take control of our lives, of hiding from existential discomfort. It's not meaningless, nor harmless, but it's a distraction just the same. Barbie chooses to live in an imperfect (and patriarchal) mortal world, over a utopia, because she believes doing so will give her existence true meaning.

(The same can be said of consumerism. The film engages with it through the Mattel CEO bit, but it's a sub-plot, not the plot.)

The theme of the film right from the moment Barbie blurts out 'do you guys ever think about dying?' at the party is existential dread. That's what causes her to go to the real world, kicking off the story proper. Ken's patriarchy and the Mattel stuff are just things that happen along the way. They're neither the beginning of the plot, nor the end when they're resolved. The journey of the movie is Barbie coming to terms with mortality.

Good answer.

11 hours ago, mormont said:

And the film is IMO very successful in portraying that journey. The issue is that, understandably, a lot of folk come to the theatre with ideas about what this films is going to be about, and existential dread is not one of those things. Sometimes we see what we expect to see, and it confuses our perceptions a bit.

Hero's Journey.

Famous people.

This is something i’ve been thinking about since I wrote a report on the bombings for school a while back. It’s the line from the Oppenheimer movie, “They won’t understand it until they’ve used it”.

How does history play out if they don’t drop the bomb on Japan? What if the Korean War comes along and they have an arsenal of weapons that no one is really talking about yet because the true destructive power of these things isn’t part of the public consciousness?

29 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Like, they specifically chose Hiroshima as the first target because it had been relatively untouched until then so they could more clearly see the damage the bomb, specifically, did. That doesn't sound like strategy, that sounds like an experiment.

They may have left it untouched in the first place to keep it on the target list for the bomb. 

As you say, the argument from military necessity is feeble. But it could still have been part of their thinking in July of 1945. The island hopping campaign was horrifying. No one was happy about the thought of putting boots on the ground in Japan. 

4 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

We're getting a whole lot of wonderful results of treating disease, disease vectors and how efficacious vaccines are by the natural experiment of US states choosing or not choosing to vaccinate. Morally horrible, massively bad for society and health outcomes, scientifically super useful. 

Yeah, you're not wrong. Then again, I don't get my information from facebook clickbait so what do I know?

What I was talking about is whether or not to use the knowledge gleaned from grotesque human experiments. On the one hand, the knowledge exists. It will never not exist. It can help people. On the other hand, Nazis. 

3 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Wasn't this also a factor in dropping the bomb? Or am I reading the wrong history? 

The Americans would never admit to dropping the bomb to awe the Soviets but, yeah, that was probably part of it. Also likely a desire to end the war before the Soviets got too close to the home islands. 

ETA: Since Soviet archives have opened up, we now know with certainty that Japan was trying to convince the Soviets to act as mediator in peace talks with the USA; starting no later than January of 1945. Unbeknownst to them, The Soviets were quietly moving troops to the asian mainland after Germany surrendered.  The Russian declaration must have come as a massive shock to them. 

18 minutes ago, Madame deVenoge said:

Speaking of the Japanese -

Unnamed Japanese doctors did an incredible amount of, and atrocious and not just ethically impermissible, but from a humanitarian standpoint, completely impermissible and unacceptable, set of medical experiments that put Josef Mengele to shame.

Apparently, we - the US, and all Western powers - signed some sort of agreement allowing us to use the….results…of the experiments, without ever naming Japan as a bad actor.

And these experiments were done mostly on US and Euro POWs, that’s pretty bad sh1t.

Germany too. A lot of what we know about treating hypothermia came from Nazi experiments on living prisoners. 

Morally, it’s a shit sandwich. 

4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

One thing I've never understood about Rome, all the great men were not called Marcus (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Augustus) for about 100 years.

Pretty much everyone a step below in fame/achievement was. It's like there was a glass ceiling for Marcus/Mark. 

Crassus was a “Marcus”.

… maybe that’s why. 

The bombing is a controversial topic, especially considering:

1. The day before Nagasaki, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, which terrified the Japanese. 

2. The invasion of the home islands was scheduled for early November; 3 months after the bombs were dropped.

Given the state of their military in the summer of 1945 and the fact that they were the only axis country left standing, a lot could have happened in that 3 months. 

What isn’t controversial is that Leslie Groves had an opinion on Truman and the bomb:

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As far as I was concerned, his decision was one of non-interference–basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.”

”As time went on, and as we poured more and more money and effort into the project, the government became increasingly committed to the ultimate use of the bomb.”

”Truman did not so much say ‘yes’ as not say ‘no.’ It would indeed have taken a lot of nerve to say ‘no’ at that time.”

Le May, a guy who had no problem with dropping bombs on cities, was skeptical of the bombings’ impact on the Japanese surrender. He’d already bombed the shit out of most of that country anyway. 

On 9/21/2023 at 5:51 AM, SeanF said:

 

As a counterpoint, one of the most underrated (during his time in office) leaders was Truman.  I can't think of single big decision (dropping the Bomb, desegregating the army, the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, creating NATO, the Korean War) that the man got wrong.

In fairness, the Marshall Plan passed the senate and house with veto proof majorities. Whether he favoured it or not he kinda had to sign it.

In terms of blunders, his attitude toward the Soviets would be a big one. He kind of set the tone early for what would become the second red scare and the Cold War in general. Somewhat less belligerence early on would have saved a lot of aggravation later. I think later in life he may have realized this.

He also seriously under estimated the Soviets ability to develop an atomic bomb, which contributed to the above.

And this. Somewhat obscure but still.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._v._Sawyer

2 hours ago, Mladen said:

…INCEPTION and INTERSTELLAR…

Not so much when you account for ticket price inflation. But yeah, still pretty amazing, especially when you consider that the films you mention both benefitted from a pg-13 rating. 

20 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Why is DeSantis telling Floridians not to get vaccinated?

Oh, I see, everyone younger than 65 not to get vaccinated.

And masks and restrictions are just “a bogus attempt by the left to expand government control”. Be part of the resistance! They aren’t going to close schools down! Nope!

I will never set foot in Florida again, I guess.

You know, given the relative infection and mortality rates of unvaccinated and vaccinated, (what I suspect) the placement on the political spectrum for the people who fall into those two groups, and how age factors into both… over a few years… this noise has to have measurable effects in election outcomes. 

I finally saw the Barbie movie. 

I honestly don’t know what to make of it. It’s definitely very funny. Very well made. Great performances (Ryan Gosling is hilarious). I enjoyed it a lot.

Im not exactly sure what it was trying to do, if it was doing anything at all. Is it criticizing vulgar consumerism while embracing it at the same time? Is it acknowledging how relevant and irrelevant Barbie is at the same time? Does it work as dystopian sci-fi (yes). 

And, “film bros”? Really? Are we still cracking that old chestnut? What year is it again?

On the bright side, contrary to what the social media commentariat have been warning me about, my genitals are unaffected. I’m not lining up to have a bar code stamped on my forehead by my new feminist overlord. I’m still mostly heterosexual*, and I still like “football and porno and books about war”. 

Body hair too. Not a single empty follicle on Deadlines’ luxurious, hairy chest. Sadly, the same can be said of his back…

*Ryan Gosling’s abs. C’mon, people. No one’s that straight. 

21 hours ago, Mladen said:

 

"Nature's way of healing." 

I have to agree with Denis. I thought this film would be successful, but if you told me it would do Dr Strange MoM moneys, I'd have said you were nuts. 

20 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Hope Killers of the Flower Moon also makes a killing at the box office….and that The Marvels flops  

That's mean. You're being mean.

They can both have some moneys.