This is a dismal year.

The two most unpopular candidates in the history of polling, running against one another in the same election.

People taking to violence against one another in frustration.

I mean…what tragedy is the flag at half-mast for today? I’ve lost track.

And we are just lined up for half the country to go insane after the presidential election. Half the country will go ballistic, and violence is possible in the aftermath.

This is a dismal year.

Well, I would say that the choice of Pence will wipe out the vast majority of Sanders supporters who thought they might vote for Trump over Hillary.

I don’t see any votes gained with this pick; I see some lost.

Let me just be clear that I do not endorse Sanders’ endorsement.

But Sanders isn’t my hero whom I feel the need to protect.

I understand why he did it. That’s politics. I can afford to be more idealistic because I’m not a politician. He has to consider the real outcomes of real decisions, and make a choice based on those assessments. He got the best possible outcome he could. He raised a lot of issues and made them debatable where before his campaign, they were invisible in the mainstream. He moved the party platform to the left (fwiw), and he has grown more powerful in the senate personally which positions him better for continuing to fight for his principles.

Personally, I don’t know for sure that Trump is worse, though he certainly is riskier. I mean, we know what kind of crap we will get from President Clinton, but electing President Trump is kind of like sitting on a keg of powder and lighting it just to see where you will go. And for sure his SC nominations are going to be no bueno. In any event, I can see why Sanders thinks Clinton is the lesser of two evils, and more susceptible to influence from the movement he represents.

I am a bit disappointed that he endorsed her. But I see it as a calculated retreat to another position to wait for reinforcements rather than a betrayal.

I’m still voting for Stein (as of now).

zn wrote:

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I don’t like the way this guy writes this but still, it’s a view you see out there.

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4 ways Bernie Sanders changed the Democratic Party

Yeah, that’s not well-written.

Here is Robert Reich on the same topic:

Covenant is also darker. He starts off by raping a 15 or 16 year old girl. Pietten (is that his name?) licks the blood of his parents off his hands. The giant triplets(?) murder all the giants. I mean…these aren’t just orcs, and goblins, and shit that is all a safe moral distance away.

nittany ram wrote:

zn wrote:

In terms of character driven works in fantasy, that would include Martin. Arguably he was actually making up for a deficiency he saw in Tolkien.

Along with Martin’s GOT, Donaldson’s ‘The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant’ and Rothfuss’ ‘Kingkiller Chronicles’ have a lot of character development as does the ‘Shannara’ series by Terry Brooks. Of course, Those
books also have great storylines. Like anything else, the best fantasy has some of both I suppose.

I thought of Covenant, too, when you wrote that fantasy is usually plot-driven rather than character-driven. Covenant is a hell of a character. I am surprised nobody has made movies of the Covenant Chronicles. I read somewhere that there had been a couple of false starts. Somebody owns the rights, but it’s just never got underway for some reason. I don’t know what the problem is, but there are hundreds of millions of dollars lying there waiting for somebody to pick them up.

bnw wrote:

I’m not a fan. My family is. To a casual observer like myself I see little difference in complexity of character between Falstaff and Bilbo Baggins. Shakespeare never reached this pinnacle of success,

Which goes to show you don’t know the first thing about Falstaff. And that’s fine. You said “to a casual observer….”

You will get precious little out of Shakespeare as a casual observer. He takes work. A lot of work. Because of the language barrier. The first thing you have to do is learn Shakespeare’s language which is halfway to learning a second language. On top of that, he used it in a highly sophisticated way, both in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. And a lot of it is poetry, not prose. Several of his famous speeches are actually written as sonnets. So to crack that nut, you first have to understand what the words mean, perhaps understand a handful of allusions, and know what a sonnet is, and spend some time with it to savor the literary stunt he just pulled off.

Then you see that he has his noble characters talk in iambic pentameter a lot, and in verse, and his working class grunts don’t. Furthermore, they tend to butcher the language when they speak, misusing words and so on which creates a hell of a lot of humor…unless you don’t know what the words mean in the first place!

And you have to crack the language before you crack the play. Falstaff, as it happens, is a character in three plays, so to understand Falstaff…well, you have a lot of work in front of you.

I get that the vast majority of people don’t want to put that kind of effort in when there are a lot of compelling stories around in print and on screen that are rich and satisfying, and immediately accessible and comprehensible. I am not a missionary for Shakespeare. He is too damn much work for me to recommend him to somebody casually.

But…he and Roddenberry and Tolkien are not equivalents.

No, I deleted it. I went to edit a typo, but I think I must have accidentally quoted my post instead of an edit, so I had my post, then a revised quote of my post. I blame flawed intelligence.

dunno what happened here. Delete

• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by Zooey.

bnw wrote:

Zooey wrote:

I cannot understand presidents who surround themselves with Yes Men. I would offer bnw a spot in the White House, for sure.

I would be honored. Of course I would request permission to participate via some secure teleconferencing set up since all that dope smoking in cabinet meetings would be tough on my lungs. As for your State of the Union speeches I wouldn’t mind being the designated survivor either.

LOL.

You got it. Consider the conditions met.

wv wrote:

In sharp contrast to FDR, who picked experts from various backgrounds, often representing unorthodox opinions, Obama’s “expertocracy” was the paragon of professional orthodoxy and right thinking.

Yeah, I came to the conclusion years ago that if I was president, I would stock at least half of my cabinet with people who don’t agree with me. Maybe not the cabinet, but…you know…advisers. I would want to argue with people who believe something else, and if I think I win the argument, then I do whatever that thing is. And if I think I lose the argument, then I don’t. I cannot understand presidents who surround themselves with Yes Men. I would offer bnw a spot in the White House, for sure.

Karp’s explanation is a variant of what is known as Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” which in essence claims that the leadership of an institution is first and foremost concerned about its own power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. In case of US political parties, the party bosses are more concerned with keeping their control of their respective parties than with winning elections….

Deborah. Wasserman. Schultz.

And Howard Dean, and Harry Reid, and Barney Fucking Frank. And I could go on.

Billy_T wrote:

False Flag.

. . . .

How convenient. Hildabeast no longer leads the news.

These are terrible times, with raw emotions swirling to the top. I get that. But you don’t really think this was a set up to help out Clinton, do you? That’s Alex Jones territory, and he inhabits a place of gross hysteria and paranoia, not sanity.

You’re better than that, bnw.

Let’s put the outrage against Hillary’s emails in a little context.

Ford pardoned Nixon.

Reagan made a deal with Iranian revolutionaries to hold the hostages until after the election, then Reagan sold arms to a terrorist state and funneled the money to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua without congress knowing about it.

Bush Jr. falsely and deliberately misled Americans into believing Iraq and Hussein were connected to 9/11 in order to start the war opposed by almost every nation on the planet that cost us trillions of dollars and more lives than were lost on 9/11.

Dick Cheney outed a covert CIA operative for revenge.

But the outrage is Hillary’s use of a private server for her emails.

Alrighty then.

Basically, if you weren’t indignant about the above actions by Republicans, I am not going to listen to you talk about Hillary Clinton.

All the money and the guy with the swastika tattoo on his neck.

The LBJ movie, I think, is based on a stage play that debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 4 or 5 years ago. It began, iirc, with LBJ being sworn in after JFK’s assassination, and covered the civil rights story. MLK was a character in the play, too. The LBJ stuff is a completely different movie.

barf

bnw wrote:

Zooey wrote:

bnw wrote:

================

Trump has been out front in promoting women and minorities yet he’s constantly called a racist. Thats why.

Oh, for chrissakes. He has said that the Mexicans coming here are the worst society has to offer. “When Mexico sends you its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Never mind that Mexico isn’t “sending” anybody, that statement is appalling, and there is no way to get out of the fact that it is racist. And inflammatory.

He wants to ban ALL Muslims from coming to the US. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and estimates are that 70,000 – 100,000 of them support ISIS. That is racist.

So he employs some Latinos.

That’s supposed to exonerate him from charges of racism?

Hell, plenty of plantation owners employed black people after the Civil War.

Mexico IS sending people across the border. The Mexican government wants the US$$$$ sent back to Mexico to prop up their economy.

When the FBI states that they can’t vet these people then a timeout is justified until they can. Trump also asks why doesn’t the countries in that part of the world take in these refugees?

Keep up with the racism stuff because it doesn’t work any more.

You are not arguing that he isn’t racist.

You are arguing that his racism is justifiable.