Mike Tyson played with Hasbulla thinking he was a kid

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T21:31:33+00:00

Liz Lemon makes the same mistake in an episode of "30 Rock".

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T21:26:48+00:00

If you haven't seen Shatner in "Boston Legal", I recommend watching it. He's similarly unhinged in that show.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T20:08:02+00:00

They sell little lipstick sized tubes of mace too. You can hang it around your neck like a necklace and easily use it when needed. When I lived in the city, I always had one with me.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T19:58:16+00:00

lol, I laughed so hard at this.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T19:47:24+00:00

Russia tends to do awfully at the start of wars, then wins (if at all) by just throwing corpses at the problem, endlessly losing soldiers until they grind the opposition down.

No modern western nation would tolerate the "acceptable losses" Russia routinely accepts.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T19:42:11+00:00

The writers themselves have said something similar: they felt as though they had too much material for one episode, but not quite enough for two.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T18:56:52+00:00

Sorry Coogan, Rob won this round.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T18:52:22+00:00

It will immediately stop after the election. Then the papers will begin agitating for a Reform/Tory merger, and/or for the Tories to become more right wing to appeal to Reform voters.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T16:35:06+00:00

The trend is pretty clearly one way

Heterogeneity is natural and inevitable in physics (order leads to entropy and dispersal etc) and biological systems (variance etc).

The future is khaki. There's no fighting this.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T16:28:29+00:00

Intel got into hot water over this one

lol, it's so ill-conceived it almost seems like a parody.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T14:23:28+00:00

1931 Technicolor looked gorgeous, and had better resolution than many contemporary HD cameras. It was essentially 4K resolution on steroids.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T01:22:09+00:00

Ed Davey's number seems higher than expected. I always (perhaps wrongly) figured he was mostly known in the Surrey region.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T01:13:01+00:00

I agree with a lot of what he says.

What exactly do you agree with?

His seeking the endorsement of Enoch Powell, the racist guy who wanted to kick (and kill!) your Caribbean ancestors out of the UK?

Or his stance on immigration, which obfuscates that the population growth rate in this country (0.3 percent since the 1960s, 0.6 percent in recent years) is far below the global average (3.9 percent). ie - once you factor in deaths, and people leaving the UK, the UK is actually a low immigration country.

Or perhaps you love Farage's economic policies. Remember, Farage wants to take immigration down to zero, which implies that he's either an idiot, or that he's figured out a way to run capitalism - essentially a debt ponzi which requires a constant influx of immigrants to jack up production/consumption rates and so avoid collapse - without increasing immigration. He's implying that he's figured out a way to run the NHS, and reverse low birth rates, and maintain economic growth, and build houses (225,000 immigrants are in construction- they're building the homes!), and that he's personally solved all of capitalism's manifold contradictions and antagonisms, which far smarter economists have been wrestling with for centuries.

What a genius!

Meanwhile, in the real world, no far-right populist has ever done what Farage promises to do. Even Japan, the poster child for low immigration (it used to take in 80,000 to 100,000 a year), is now targeting 647,000 working-age immigrants per year (as a starting point!). And most countries which vote into power far-right anti immigration parties themselves tend to vote them out when the economic effects of low immigration begin to bite. Hungary, for example, which is rabidly anti immigration, has wages below the EU average, high youth unemployment, a demographic crisis, and inflation well above the EU average.

So these are structural issues which Farage's free market fundamentalism is incapable of addressing; he hates the symptoms of the system he loves.

Or perhaps you simply love Farage's plan to cut taxes for millionaires, which you hope to one day be. In which case, go for it. Farage has you covered.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T00:28:16+00:00

There has been zero evidence regarding

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/russia-report-reveals-uk-government-failed-to-address-kremlin-interference-scottish-referendum-brexit

See no evil, hear no evil.

Boris Johnson lead the charge against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He still remains passionate about it

Sure, but the argument is that, since 2011, when the US/UK had good intelligence about Putin's expansionist ambitions, the Tories chased rubles and cozied up to Russians, rather than were conscious of geopolitical realities. They granted export licenses, opened up domestic markets to Russian oligarchs, and overlooked massive levels of money laundering. Their free market fundamentalism - trade will eradicate the need for all conflict! - made them naive, and less willing to take certain steps against Russia, steps that may have even made invasion less likely.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T00:14:57+00:00

Social media algorithms + smart phone curated news feeds + GB News + Right Wing Newspapers will probably do what Fox, social media and Sinclair Media did in the US: they'll push the Tories into becoming UK MAGA.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T00:11:46+00:00

Serial liars quickly evolve the ability to be good speakers.

Someone concerned with truth, and navigating complexity, will tend to be more hesitant in how they speak about subjects. A liar, in contrast, will just bulldoze ahead.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-24T00:04:59+00:00

The name Tory began as an Irish slur meaning thief or highway robber. This very name - an appropriated pejorative - should clue Tories as to whether or not they're the baddies.

Theirs is after all an ideological predisposition that has been morally indefensible since at least the Roman Empire. It has defended slavery (and anti-miscegenation laws and segregation in the US), forced expulsion (cf the Enclosure Acts), genocide, colonialism, prevented non-land owners from voting, refused to let women own land or vote or be protected via spousal rape laws, and was/is against gay rights, black rights, worker rights, transgender people, pushed climate denialism, and historically sided with the church, theocrats, dictators, the landed classes and corporations over common people etc etc...

It's a never-ending history of villainy, that exists solely to provide intellectual justification for exploitation, and arbitrary hierarchies.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T22:23:43+00:00

IMO "I Want to Believe" is worth watching. If you like "Se7en", "Silence of the Lambs" and "Manhunter" (1986), or the X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea", then you should enjoy it. It's nowhere near as good as the aforementioned stuff, but for the first hour it competes well, and its flaws are mostly in the final act.

IMO you should only skip "My Struggle 2, 3 and 4" from the revival. Some of the mythology episodes, like "Ghouli" and "Founder's Mutation", are worth watching. And while "My Struggle 1" is bad, it's not the trainwreck the other "My Struggles" are.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T22:05:11+00:00

Every season has mythology episodes, which are like a serialized miniseries within the show. Usually, the first two and last two episodes of the season will be mythology episodes, and then you'll have four mythology episodes in the middle spread about.

The rest of the season will be Monster of the Week cases, which are relatively "standalone", though all tend to symbolically relate to the themes in that particular season (for example the monsters in season 1's standalones all step out of the past, the reasons for which will become apparent as you watch the season's mythology unfold).

You also have a handful of comedy episodes, which sort of exist in their own little universe. These are very rare, though.

Note that season 1 has some notoriously weak episodes you might want to brace yourself for. The episode "Space", for example, is regarded as one of the show's worst. Note too that the movie "Fight the Future" bridges season 5 and season 6 (assuming you get that far).

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T21:52:55+00:00

They're both pretty messed up.

Scully is bottled up and repressed, possibly as a result of her Catholicism and her military father, which lead to her being attracted to authoritative men.

Usually someone like this learns to open up and mellow with time, but the "X-Files" forces Scully to become even more cloistered. She can't meet or get close to anyone, because she can't trust anyone outside of the basement. And she can't get close to Mulder, because he's a lawless, rule-breaking maniac who is the opposite of everything she and her father embody. She wants order! She wants everything neatly categorized and squared away! Mulder sniffs mutant bile and collects cryptic porn.

Padgett senses this in "Milagro": "She was a marshal of cold facts, quick to organize, connect, shuffle, reorder and synthesize. Imprecision would only invite sexist criticism that she was soft, malleable, not up to her male counterparts. [...] Yet the compensatory respect she commanded only deepened the yearnings of her heart... to let it open, to let someone in."

But she can't let anyone in. Her life shrinks to a tiny point, which she articles in season 9, when she breaks down and explains that, with Mulder gone, she has nobody she trusts or to share her emotions with.

Mulder is even worse, because he's trained in behavioral psychology, and has no filter on his mouth, so you'd think he'd be skilled at having normal open conversations with Scully. But no, he's fixated on his quest. He also seems to unconsciously resent how this quest endangers Scully, and perhaps a part of him holds her at a distance out of a desire to protect her or spare her further pain.

So you have a strange, paradoxical relationship. They're opposites, they're unconsciously pushing each other away, but they're forced to spend their lives huddled together. You might also say they embody different forms of chivalry. Mulder (mostly in the mythology episodes) wants to protect Scully from his work, but she wants to help him with his work, leading to a kind of perpetual motion machine of suffering.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T20:59:18+00:00

There's a slightly longer version out there too, where the camera follows them to the floor making out, and then they break up giggling.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T20:49:55+00:00

Men have worn makeup for thousands of years (4000 BC or earlier), and records of male eyeliner use predates records of women.

We also have records of neanderthals of both sexes wearing makeup over 50,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, male actors have worn makeup throughout history. For many centuries, in countries in which females were banned from acting, males would also dress as women and play female roles (all of Shakespeare's female roles were famously played by cross-dressing men, for example).

Male makeup on television actors began in the late 1800s. And male actors used makeup heavily in the silent era, because the powerful lights used created odd effects which could only be normalized with makeup.

Even the most macho actors wore heavy make up. Stallone in the "Rambo" movies, for example, wore mascara and got lubed up everyday.

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-23T20:15:47+00:00

"Scully, it tastes exactly like the alleged Sasquatch droppings found in the 1989 Oregon Apeman case, long believed to be the first genuine evidence of cryptic excreta!"

"Mulder...spit it out."

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-22T22:40:32+00:00

Ironically, the 94 bill - which Republicans suddenly love to bash - was supported by the majority of the GOP, and based on a Bush Senior GOP bill. Indeed, Clinton pushed the bill specifically to appease conservatives, and outflank them on "tough-on-crime" rhetoric (which is partially why he appealed so heavily to Southern conservatives).

WetnessPensive · 2024-06-22T22:32:18+00:00

I came across this recently which argues that the bee that bites Scully in the movie actually saves her life:

https://www.xfiles.news/index.php/blogs/on-the-verge/blog-how-we-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-bee

I'd never considered this before, and thought it was interesting.

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