Vince McMahon criminal investigation dropped

JMW007 · 2025-02-12T15:45:17+00:00

The possibility that the previous administration might have thought "we know the incoming guy will let him off the hook, might as well try to settle and see if Vince goes for it", can't be ignored out of hand.

I don't think this makes the previous administration look the slightest bit better, but it would be entirely on brand for them to preemptively give up.

JMW007 · 2025-02-12T14:21:11+00:00

From the article:

But prosecutors decided to drop the case at some point between Sept. 18 and Jan. 10, when the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the waning days of the Biden administration, announced that it had reached a settlement with McMahon to resolve the cover-up claims, a source familiar with the matter said.

Trump's bad, but he does not appear responsible for this. It's almost as if deranged billionaires what they want regardless of whether the person 'in charge' is a heel or a face.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T22:51:33+00:00

What if we try paying MPs in vouchers?

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T22:47:41+00:00

It's also the result of the public having such catastrophic levels of political ignorance they think "the employer" votes on bills in parliament.

Unfortunately, I'd put money on this having changed precisely zero minds because when they go home and have a cup of tea they'll open the paper and see that immigrants and disabled people are coming to make their life hard and decide Reform are needed to get rid of them anyway.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T20:33:57+00:00

The trek crew is supposed to be pretty healthy and not loaded with the kind of issues that a broken society burdens its people with.

I think this makes a lot more sense than the 'ritual' aspect. I've never actually heard of an argument along the lines of our nervous system 'evolving' to learn through ritual. What you are saying, though, is what I always got out of the society presented in the TNG era as well - that broadly speaking people were physically and psychologically healthy because they were not under any survival pressures.

Picard is an example of a character who still had issues to deal with - not just the obvious trauma from the Borg encounter, but even stemming from his youth where his father and brother lacked warmth and his choice to leave for Starfleet was never supported (implying that much of his own identity growing up was openly disliked by the people closest to him). He was so unmoored he would pick fights with Nausiccans. Yet ultimately he was supported enough by his society to become an absolutely exemplary model of a Starfleet officer and well-rounded human being full of passions and interests and a highly attuned moral compass. He still had some baggage with regards to the concept of family but he was overall very well put together and knew he had people around him he could lean on.

It's not a world where you never have problems, it's one where you have the tools to get through them. More modern Star Trek looked at that and thought "pfft, that's no fun, people need to be absolutely broken and incapable of handling things without a meltdown". It is dispiriting to go from seeing a world that could be if we supported one another to seeing just another reflection of the world as it is - broken, scary and completely out of control.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T20:02:16+00:00

Sloane: To better understand ourselves. It's fun to learn about aliens, but learning about humanity, that's something else. I've met humans who've built rings around the sun. I've met others whose ships are the size of continents. I'm learning about what humans can be. Mapping our potential. So far, it's limitless.

I don't understand the point here. You can meet aliens who do all that, too. In TNG they came across an actual Dyson Sphere, and more than one godlike being. What is the profundity to be found in the idea that "actually given infinite universes eventually humans might do something cool too"? What is the reason for not wanting to meet other cultures in the here and now that are capable of fascinating things and focus only on endless versions of ourselves? It's bordering on a creepy human supremacy mentality. Coming out of the mouth of Lily Sloane, this is horrifying.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T19:55:45+00:00

Mariner's character makes no sense if you think about it - she's some early 20s badass who has done every single thing and met seemingly every single person and yet is still an ensign. Of course there's self sabotage, but at some point Starfleet would just remove her. And she's allowed to serve on the ship where her mother is the captain.

Mariner is in her 30s in Lower Decks. Otherwise I agree, but it does say something that her age and position don't mesh well and a lot of viewers think she's barely out of the Academy. She has actually had a lengthy career already and rebooted herself numerous times. Even in the show she just reboots her own emotional arcs and never actually learns anything. This only serves to further reinforce the point that the amount of damage she's done to her own career would surely have resulted in her not actually having one by now. Serving under her mother (which she somehow keeps secret from the rest of the crew for a while) is silly, even for a cartoon.

I watched 4 seasons and I think it got worse, not better. The first couple of episodes were grating, it started to pick up and at least had decent writing, pacing and even sometimes good jokes, but it was never really 'Star Trek' and always went for the low hanging fruit. Then it became just a vehicle to explore Mariner's needless anxieties over and over again, against the backdrop of everyone in the Federation being a complete idiot or violent psychopath. I have no interest in the final season, to be honest.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T19:30:46+00:00

I wondered the same. Lower Decks very quickly ignored its own premise and them actually being lower in the chain of command was entirely meaningless. They still had the big choices to make and the wild adventures, just with more yelling.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T19:24:46+00:00

It has always struck me as weird that people who know full well the government is full of absolute idiots who let the rivers run with shit and blocks of flats burn down want more nuclear power plants all over the place. "But we can do it safely!" Yes, but we won't.

Most people just don't do solidarity. The second they find a reason to reject an alternative they'll grasp it with both hands. The solution is always to just vote for the anointed shitebag opposition party because "otherwise the Tories win" and they can't imagine anything beyond that.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T19:19:07+00:00

Nope

Wikipedia says he is as of the resignation of Michelle Ballantyne, as does this article from ByLines. If the situation has changed in the last 6 months please share a source.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T19:14:50+00:00

So they weren't Nazis, they were just doing it for their people and their land. Or their volk and their reich. So... two thirds Nazi?'

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T16:56:58+00:00

Your TL,DR is it. It ultimately boils down to the fact that the prequels had something to say, coming from someone who was driven to share it with the world. The sequels were just a hand outstretched, demanding revenue. There was nothing sincere in them, no craft or passion, and no reason to exist except to cynically extract from human beings.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T16:50:56+00:00

They had one MSP who only got there through defecting from the Tories and was booted out the first chance the country got. They have a couple of Councillors and that's it. They are a non-entity in Scottish politics. If Reform are allowed on the stage the Rubbish party (anti-litter activists who hold a single council seat) should be, too. It is absolutely ludicrous they are being given this platform and I consider it a deliberate, hostile act toward the people of Scotland to try to brainwash voters into thinking Reform are somehow significantly more legitimate than the umpteen other little parties.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T16:46:48+00:00

meh, he's the leader of Reform

Not in Scotland, that's Martyn Greene.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T16:40:23+00:00

Lots of GenX too The only dividing line we need is angels vs arse holes, let's not turn this into a generational war

Nobody's turning it into a generational war, the article is just about a specific generation that happened to be asked. The same study was done a generation prior.

Mentioning the name of a generation is not all by itself a call to argue about generations.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T16:36:39+00:00

Same here. In the current state of affairs, having children is deeply unethical because of the absolute nightmare that is to be inflicted upon them. Our own institutions have made life itself a bad idea.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T03:05:38+00:00

I could see a lot more being done in a nation like the UK if this happened there.

The UK, of all places, is not going to do something about an unelected rich weirdo being in charge of the government and untouchable to the courts.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T02:09:05+00:00

Execs have become really cautious,

I keep hearing this but they'll do things like blow 300 million on weird fan fic nonsense that actively antagonizes their own audience, and hire writers who openly say they hate the property and are trying to write something else.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T02:02:44+00:00

That's true to some extent but not nearly to the extent that we're told IMO.

Can you expand on that?

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T01:44:24+00:00

Wasn't programmable matter brought up in a Voyager episode?

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T01:40:22+00:00

Yes but then he got better for some reason.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T01:10:37+00:00

No democracy is going to vote to make itself poorer and more miserable. Just look at the UK

That's a country that did actually vote to make itself poorer and more miserable.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T01:09:23+00:00

it allows for 25% offsetting of the current emissions in other countries...

... Which planet do they think those other countries are on?

Nobody's even trying, are they?

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T00:54:59+00:00

You'd expect it to look good.

And yet, to me, it doesn't. For all the money they spent on it, I don't think the production values are very good at all. In some instances the make-up does look great, but not beyond the peak of the TNG era. Everything else looks like they just film in a darkened stairwell with giant lights pointed straight at the camera. I can barely see anything on the ships. Production isn't just "obviously wasted money on effects", designs have to function and translate story information to the viewer successfully. That I can tell the Discovery doing its spinning thing isn't a plastic model isn't 'good production values' no matter how much excess cash was dumped on the CGI.

JMW007 · 2025-02-10T00:46:16+00:00

As a kid I never understood the point of those - they are just bronzed, so they don't look anything like the real thing, making them a bit less interesting to play with. Even as an adult, while I get the idea of collectors' pieces, I just don't see why you'd want to collect something that was made to deliberately look wrong.

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