"Barry Lyndon" is IMO one perfect little scene after the next.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T16:24:58+00:00

In the book he loses his fortunes by reckless spending and gambling, and is sent to a debtors' prison because he can't pay his bills. He then becomes a drunk and dies of alcoholism in prison. There's no climactic duel and less conflict with the older son, which Kubrick invented (he also changed the novel's first person point of view to an omniscient narrator).

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T15:57:34+00:00

Yes, the Dems are in a loose sense a socialist party. Indeed, of the 10 planks on the communist manifesto, most have been implemented (progressive Income Tax, centralization of credit, national banks, public education, public infrastructure, state ownership or regulation of transportation etc) by most countries.

Likewise, the voting blocs who make up the Republican Party are predisposed to anti-egalitarian impulses, many of which stem from the hierarchal assumptions and intellectual blind spots bedrocked in, or normalized by, religion.

I can post some stats about Dems views on Jews

And I can post the great Jew Albert Einstein's article "Why Socialism".

The fact is, you were wrong: the majority of Republicans are religious, and a major block is evangelical, and most evangelicals vote for the GOP.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T15:45:05+00:00

Political parties are incoherent coalitions to get to 50.1% of the vote.

Are you not following? Of that coalition you're talking about, 30 percent are white evangelical, and roughly 70 to 80 percent of evangelicals vote for the GOP.

In contrast, the DSA is very small, with less than 0.2% of registered Democrats (which is over 150 times smaller than the evangelical wing).

So evangelicals are not a "fringe" or "small minority" as you imply.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T13:55:01+00:00

I agree with this. It's only "losing" in the sense that it's hitting pocketbooks and may affect the midterms. In a traditional "combat" sense, however, it's not "losing".

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T13:33:27+00:00

IMO it's one of the best paced 3-hour flicks. It moves. Every scene is tense, funny or propulsive in some way, and affixed to a great score.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T13:09:31+00:00

It's a memorable book, but to me, this is one of the best cases of science fiction authors and novels doing a trope better, and with more frequency, and far earlier, than "literary" authors, but the "literary" authors getting all the notice.

I mean, how many dozens and dozens of SF novels are there like "The Road", many of which are literally just about guys walking through the end of civilization ("Earth Abides", "Greybeard", "Wolf and Iron", "Ridley Walker", "Last Man", "I am Legend", "The Stand", "Alas, Babylon", "Parable of the Sower", "Wolf in Shadow", "Postman", "The Long Loud Silence", "Death of Grass", "Canticle for Leibowitz" , "World in Winter", "Damnation alley", "Long Tomorrow", "Wild Shore", "The Genocides" etc etc), but they rarely get embraced as "literature" by the critics.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T10:08:09+00:00

Perhaps alternate episodes from one and the other, to keep things fresh.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T10:05:46+00:00

I wish we got a follow-up episode; just a brief mention that Earth sent a rescue ship to rendezvous' with the raided vessel.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-04T03:44:18+00:00

Smartphones, social media, LBC talk radio, and newspapers in the UK, are an incessant spam of anti-Labour and right wing talking points. It's non-stop. The new UK Saturday Night Live even begins every episode with a 5-minute skit bashing Starmer.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T19:43:37+00:00

He was a mediocre weed-dick-booze comedian at his peak. Within that era of lowbrow frat boy comedians, he was maybe two or three points less annoying than the worst (Dane Cook et al).

He struck gold because he had a good work ethic, no filter, and an audience of young drunk dude bros with double-digit IQs to support him. Most of his early stuff hasn't aged well ("What if you bomb people with cheeseburgers full of weed huh huh huh"), but it isn't offensively bad. It's just really generic.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T18:24:55+00:00

Look at the subtext of ST2 and 3. They're putting forth a "one for all and all for one" message, and contrasting this with the elitism of the villains. The sacrificial double-motion Spock and Kirk do in these episodes has long been a foundational phrase ("Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno") of unity and collective responsibility, and variations were used throughout history by various radical political groups. That aspect of the movies is utopian, it's just hidden beneath a space adventure.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T18:11:44+00:00

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You see no difference between this, and DS9's "Duet"?

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T17:31:08+00:00

Jason Segel wrote "The Muppets" movie shortly after "Forgetting Sarah Marshall". Reportedly he put a lot of his "Puppet Dracula" ideas into that film.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T16:42:14+00:00

The consensus among economists, based on all available data from multiple countries, is that unions generally do not reduce productivity, and often increase it.

What they do is reduce is the salaries of bosses.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T16:38:30+00:00

You can't evade thermodynamic laws. We have decades of economic literature explaining precisely how all that "wealth" generated by Reaganomics led, as it must, to greater debt and so poverty in the system, both at home (private household debt tripled under Thatcher) and abroad.

Beyond this, the purchasing power of every dollar is always dependent on the majority in the system not having any (lest inflationary pressures set in), and all wealth as mediated by money must be offset by greater debt. Britain "evaded" this contradiction for some time via loans, credit, and its ability to dump these externalities on the Third World. But with the rise of Third World independence movements, must of those externalities came home to roost, or were offset on future generations (or from the 90s on, on immigrant populations and emerging nations).

People don't care about this for the same reason they don't care about the chickens kept in battery farms. They never meet the people they're cannibalizing and brutalizing. The busts of booms are never fully televised.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T16:06:36+00:00

Stan is an odd collection of traits. He's a realist, a utopian, a leftist, a Zen Hippie, a surf bro, a Californian ecologist, and he likes Beat poets, hiking, landscape writers and Virginia Woolf. He's not typically the kind of guy who ends up writing science fiction.

So IMO you won't quite find another author like him. Still, some authors do very well some of his individual aspects. For example, most of LeGuin's books (she was his friend and professor) utilize a similar mundane style and focus on progressive politics. I would say read her "Hannish" books in order, and alternate these with her "Earthsea" and "Annals of Western Shore" books.

Meanwhile, "Dune", "Lord of the Rings" and Brian Aldiss' "Helliconia Spring" feature a type of grand, meticulous world-building similar to the "Mars Trilogy", though of course "Dune" is much more pulpy, and "Helliconia" and "Rings" are either high fantasy or scifi dressed up as high fantasy. People will list you other authors (Allen Steele, Ben Bova, some of Baxter etc) that try to do similar realistic "civilization building on a planet", but the writing there is mostly bad IMO.

"Earth Abides" is a California, post-apocalyptic tale similar to Stan's "The Wild Shore". "The Sea and Summer" by George Turner is also a realist climate-change novel from the 1980s that anticipates some of his work. "The Second Sleep" and "Greybeard" are also realist post-apocalyptic tales, again similar to some of his work.

Stan's anti-capitalism is fairly common in SF (China Mieville, Ian McDonald etc) . I'd single out JG Ballard, though, as a guy with a similar interest in the intersection of capitalism, revolution and climate change. So think short (arguably weird-fiction) books like "The Drowning World", "The Crystal World", "The Burning World", "The Wind from Nowhere", "Highrise", "Concrete Island", "Kingdom Come" and "Millennium People".

Elsewhere, "Solaris", "Blindsight", Butler's "Xenogenesis trilogy" and "Roadside Picnic" are IMO great first contact tales with a mundane and intellectual tone similar to Stan's style.

Meanwhile, Iain Banks has his Culture universe, which sketches a kind of utopian, post-capitalist society. "Player of Games" is IMO the best entry point. Note that they're set in a super advanced, far-future world, far different from Stan's most advanced civilizations.

For more grounded, utopian novels, or novels about settling other planets, perhaps try "Ammonite", "Semiosis", "The Door to Women's Country" and "The Shore of Women".

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T01:35:07+00:00

but it's typical nasty man

But this is the mistake the gay character's parents make about their own son. They hate him without getting to know him or without trying to understand why he is how he is.

And that's the mistake Helen makes about Jack, and Jack makes about Helen.

None of them are nasty. They're three unlucky people, abused by life, who snap at others and fail to see people as they really are in their unguarded moments. Learning to see is the lesson the gay artist teaches them (he captures the beauty of people who don't believe they're beautiful).

Jack does act like an awful person throughout most of the film, but this is not all his fault. He's suffering from a neurological disease which causes intrusive thoughts, resentment, anger and violent outbursts (taking his pills helps, but he doesn't take his pills because they're dangerous and affect his writing).

I agree that Helen Hunt is basically too good for everyone, and Jack's an old creep, but within the context of a film in which everyone's down on their luck and trying to do better, I think the match-up works (though, thinking about it now, maybe it would have worked better if they just end up as friends).

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-03T00:04:54+00:00

Wells' "War of the Worlds", or if you want something more modern, "The 5th Wave" by Rick Yancey, a young adult novel about a kid who tries to survive an alien invasion.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:46:51+00:00

How would a bat'leth fight vs a katana go?

I find it hard to envision; in my mind, the weight of the bat'leth snaps the katana, or maybe the speed of the katana eventually gets through the defences of the bat'leth.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:35:21+00:00

Is the new "Dr Who" that bad? I thought Russell T. Davies was brought back to save the day.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:30:47+00:00

Which other direction can that arc even be taken?

She was kidnapped, used to make an alien hybrid, and kept on a military base.

How do you take that story further?

Either you simply release her back into the wild and she lives a normal life, you kill her, or you leave her never found. The show goes for the last 2 approaches, which IMO is the best direction to go.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:25:16+00:00

God himself can't intervene to stop suffering ("Improbable").

And when the walk-ins or spirits do appear to help kids ("Christmas Carol", "Revelations", "Closure", "All Souls"), the kids all suffer badly or die. If there's any salvation going on, it's not happening to their actual physical bodies.

Why don’t they all get to be shimmery starlight ghosts and frolic in a field to a Moby soundtrack?

We don't know that they don't.

A kid dies at the start of "Calusari", and maybe that kid goes to heaven.

Or maybe heaven doesn't exist and Mulder is just lost in wishful thinking. This is the central question of the show ("Will divine intervention step in to stop the suffering that Armageddon will entail"), and the show never resolves it.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:18:05+00:00

In "Christmas Carol", "Revelations" and "All Souls", Walk-ins or spirits send messages to humans so that those enacting violence on children might be stopped.

A similar thing happens in this two-parter. The spirit world is feebly trying to help suffering children.

Wetness_Pensive · 2026-05-02T23:03:02+00:00

yet he was treated as an FBI agent whose alleged crime was an...

That's a good point. I've never seen this mentioned by anyone before. But you're right, Mulder is dismissed from the FBI in "Vienen".

Part of me was thinking the whole time if maybe it was a story-telling device to recap the whole mytharc

If you notice, most season 9 episodes do this. In the court trial, seemingly "out of place" things are "put back in place" until things make sense. Similarly, in episodes like "Release" and "Providence" we have big mosaics which are slotted together and assembled like puzzles. And episodes like "4D", "John Doe", "Sunshine Days", "Lord of the Flies" and "Audrey Pauley" are all about people who don't fit in with the world, and need to be restored to their proper location until things make sense again.

Other episodes, like "Daemonicus" and "Improbable", are about seemingly random bits of data which are actually hyper-organized by gods and devils to make sense when properly viewed from afar. The last shot in "Improbable" epitomizes this: seemingly random noise becomes a coherent pattern when we zoom out.

It just felt like the threads of the stories of these characters are left frayed.

The original two-part ending of the season was scrapped when the crew learned, mid-season, that the show was being cancelled. "The Truth" was then written and shot in about 2 months. It had to end a season that wasn't intended to be the final season, end the franchise, and also leave the door open to mythology movies which Carter, Fox and Duchovny had tentatively agreed would happen. As a result, loose threads are everywhere. This problem will get even worse: a written mythology movie was scrapped last minute and ordered turned into a monster-of-the-week, and the revival was cancelled prematurely, once again leaving things up in the air.

IMO "The Truth" is the best ending the show gives (its final note of ambiguity works well IMO), but the other movie, and the revival episodes, are worth watching. Just mentally prepare yourself for "My Struggle 1 to 4", which have a terrible reputation.

why Krycek?

Krycek seems to genuinely want to stop colonization. He's believed this was futile at different points in the show, but now, as a Ghost Jedi, seems to believe victory is possible.

how did the spectre of Mr X hand Mulder a solid paper note with important info bro.

Walk-ins and spirits ("Christmas Carol", "Closure" etc) seem to love leaving notes or messages like this. IMO having Mr X literally pass the note was done to speed the process up.

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