And Along Came A Lady

Milton Friedman famously said if you put gov in charge of the sahara there would soon be a sand shortage–a very good reason to not let them be in charge of sex ed.

“Eph… ephemera… compiled…”
[ Slumps across desk, demands glass of wine. ]

For all you scifi fans, a new Star Trek episode has dropped, as the kids say.

a new Star Trek episode has dropped
I didn’t think it was possible for Star Trek to beclown itself any farther, but here we are.

Such damaged people were forced by societal or legal pressure to keep their dysfunctions private.
The specific dysfunctions to which I refer regard the desire/need to have power, morally derived, over people. The sexual dysfunctions and such I agree were kept private. The manifestation of the busy-bodying were more useful in the past. Prudishness, temperance, etc. We seem to have done away with those moral values and replaced them with wokeism. The busybodies just adopted the new ‘morality’ and fulfill their desires to be bossy using those reasons.

I’m sorry to hear about your cat, Governor Squid. They really do become part of the family, don’t they?

Why, since we’ve done away with most such things, does our ‘creative’ class seem stuck on remakes, parodies, and transfers of such from one media to another?
Because it’s cheap and easy and passes for deep and clever thought among the au courant and wokerati. None of these people have read a classic in their lives–even in high school where they read Cole’s Notes and not the actual text. These members of the Moronati have never read Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Dumas etc etc. Hell, they’d show more imagination if they read the pulps and stole from them.
Today, they boldly go where most people have been at least two or three times and they get pissed when they don’t receive praise and palm leaves laid before their entrance on an ass.

Why, since we’ve done away with most such things, does our ‘creative’ class seem stuck on remakes, parodies, and transfers of such from one media to another?
Budget. For any large blockbuster more than 50% of the budget is marketing, and you can’t recoup that (after spending a film’s production budget, you at least have a film, and you can always sell that to Netflix/Prime if it’s a stinker).
Since the rise of the DVD, Hollywood studios have been dealing with a calamitous collapse in their profits. Since Hollywood really doesn’t know how to make profitable movies – their business model was based on making ten movies and hoping one of them appealed enough to the market to pay for the other nine, which would get memory holed – they’ve been panicking ever since.
In the trade, the term is “pre-awareness”. The audience already knows what you’re selling, so you don’t need to spend hundreds of millions on marketing and buzz. There’s a joke that your entire marketing campaign for a superhero movie can literally be a blank poster with the chest logo on it and the words “Coming Summer [year]” and the nerds will do the work for you.

None of these people have read a classic in their lives–even in high school where they read Cole’s Notes and not the actual text. These members of the Moronati have never read Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Dumas etc etc.
I did an “experiment” in high school. Of course it wasn’t very scientific as the data set was quite small. But it was a dataset I could trust. We had two books to read. One was James’s (whichever one…too lazy to care to look it up) Turn of the Screw, forget the other one but it might come to me. I read the other one and just paid close attention in class and read the Cliff’s Notes (actually not that product but the one whose name I forget that had a red cover motif) for Turn of the Screw. I got a B on the test for the book I read. A B+ on the test for TotS. Call it confirmation bias for a 16 year old but I think it was at that point that I became heavily suspicious that there was some sort of Narrative (though that concept wasn’t a thing back then) that ran through the literature, not just what we were being taught but in the movies and even current events and history, that was much further away from the objectivity they were trying to sell. But to your point… I don’t entirely doubt that at least some of these people have read, to some effort, these books. But even that subset that did read them, did so under the tutelage and selective praise of a conformist ‘leterati’. Gee, did I misspell that?…Pity…Which also explains why when I tell women whom have read Anna Karenina that Tolstoy regarded her as a fallen woman, they either get mad at me or a light bulb goes off and they realize tharpt they were not alone in understanding the book as the author intended.
Budget
Bullshit. That’s an excuse. By them, not by you. Our current society is enormously more wealthy than those of the past that produced much more useful fiction. Even the more pulpy stuff. Try try. Leave out the ‘again’, they’ll just f it up.

Ricardo Cortez was the ultimate Sam Spade.

Thanks for the kind words, gang.
When you’re ready, maybe a new kitten from a shelter?