Provoke, Whine, Rinse, Repeat

But we haven’t managed a Hitler or a Mussolini yet.
The media tell me that Trump is worse than both combined!

Ah, yes…that bitch

“Seems to me the only immutable rule is that the writer should do something interesting and entertaining with an idea.”
Next, you’ll be telling me they can portray anyone from any race or gender. Sheesh
When people question why we Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo while to Mexicans it’s kinda…Meh.,. I like to point out that it we tend to view it as French defeat that didn’t cost us anything.
Point of order: Americans didn’t know Cinco de Mayo from the Mayo Clinic until a Mexican beer (Dos Equss?) promoted it in their ads.
You might as well tell Americans that “Born in the USA” is anything but a patriotic song, and that “Every Step You Take” is about a stalker, and “YMCA” is about grooming runaway teens to visit the bathhouses.
Which reminds me: YMCA (Emo version)

Which reminds me: YMCA (Emo version)
The absolute, all time, hands down, definitive rendition of that Irish classic, Danny Boy.

You might as well tell Americans that “Born in the USA” is anything but a patriotic song, and that “Every Step You Take” is about a stalker, and “YMCA” is about grooming runaway teens to visit the bathhouses.
You don’t want me to start on The Princess Bride.
re: Bari Weiss – there’s an interesting theory that her resignation is a cover for the fact that she was an integral part of the 2017 FISA leak that drove the phony Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and that she’s getting out now that the indictments have started coming down.

So in the interest of Open Thread, maybe someone here can help me out…
There are these questions that I have had for months now, even before lockdowns and such started, regarding these COVID-19 tests. Who makes these tests? How many different branded kits are there? What are the false positives/negatives for each? In what proportion are the different tests used in different situations? What countries/states favor which test kits? Are they ALL truly specific to COVID-19, or are some just generic Coronavirus tests, enhanced perhaps with clinical diagnosis? I have many more. I’ve asked people whom I know who work in labs and they don’t seem know and have even wished me good luck in my quest as I’m guessing no one, at a layman’s level knows this? Googling to try to gather this info mushrooms down far too many paths with far too many rabbit holes. One would think that with sooooo many people looking at these issues for sooo many months, this wouldn’t be such a hard thing to find out. And no one talks about it. It’s all masks, masks, masks, shutdown, fear, and panic.

Um …

The show was canceled around the same time that UCP and Amblin Television were trying get “Brave New World” off the ground. An initial treatment hewed closely to the 1932 novel about a future in which a strict global order is propped up by genetic and social engineering, easy access to zero-consequence drugs and sex, and a complex caste system.
But Olmstead felt the story needed a fresher take. [snip]
“We got the gig based on a pitch that approached it as a utopian fiction rather than a dystopia,” Morrison says. Showrunner and fellow exec producer David Wiener worked with Morrison and Taylor to execute on their core concept. [snip]
“The notion of the individual’s empowerment has been celebrated for hundreds of years — ever since the Enlightenment — in Western culture,” Morrison says. “In actual fact, the notion of the individual has allowed a lot of monstrous characters to take the stage. I think the idea of the collective has actually been an evolutionary jump for society.”

He’s not wrong, though. One man may be able to keep food from a village; it takes a collective to starve an entire nation!
“Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”

Morrison says
Morrison is one of those comic book writers, like Alan Moore, who consciously thinks he’s better than he is but subconsciously knows he’s pretentious and a bit shit. That’s why they work in comic books, where very few people will notice that they’re not saying anything that hasn’t been said before by better and more serious writers.

If one were of a more cynical bent, one might imagine this to be a deliberate attempt to replace the book in the popular imagination with a new version that has the completely opposite message. After all, it worked for Starship Troopers, The Princess Bride and Don Quixote.

Heh. Well now I’m all nonplussed.

>i?Heh. Well now I’m all nonplussed.

Same problem 1st season of STNG had.
After Roddenberry was safely dead, I remember seeing interviews with D. C. Fontana and other writers complaining about how they’d told Roddenberry over and over during first season that if everything was that perfect there wasn’t going to be any dramatic conflict. It’s why they all left after first season. Denise Crosby, too.