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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • There’s still an important distinction: JMS likened Babylon 5 to a novel for television. It had a defined beginning, a middle, and an end, conceptualized that way from the start of development.

    Yes, soap operas are serialized television, but totally open-ended. The producers of Dallas didn’t plan for J.R. Ewing to get shot as part of the series arc; they didn’t even plan him as a main character. A lot of soap operas have a very throw-it-against-the-wall feel. My grandmother was a Days of Our Lives watcher, and stuck it out even through the alien abduction storyline. Other people I know would stop watching for even years at a time, then come back and pick up whatever new storylines were then current.

    I mean no disrespect to soap operas, as they give lots of people years of enjoyment. TNG itself was largely episodic, but had some soap opera elements, following evolving relationships among the crew which were carried through. But that’s still not the novel-for-television concept.





  • Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to “normal.” They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.

    That’s pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection… 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That’s about it, though. Hell, this wasn’t difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to “look forward” and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.

    That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can’t act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don’t have a plan to deal with it, and they’ll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.







  • In a nutshell, the Democrats can’t convince people to vote against the dangerous candidate because right-wing populism inoculates people against facts and logic by making those things out-group markers, per se. Identity is powerful, and the human brain treats threats to identity in exactly the same way as physical threats.

    And, on the other side, Democrats can’t recognize this and respond appropriately, because they’ve made not-recognizing-it a marker of in-group identity, and they are thereby unable to decode what would make an attractive policy plan.



  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldBeep beep
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    21 days ago

    Terrible, terrible advice. That leaves a full car-length of empty pavement with the driver sight-lines of modern SUV and crossover designs. Pickup trucks are worse; I’ve seen pickup truck drivers stop a full 30 feet back. It wastes huge amounts of space on the street, and causes traffic congestion. On the other side of the coin, van and bus drivers can still get right up on your ass when following this advice.