jriddle73's Replies


Social media is still filled with it constantly, though I suspect part of it--beyond the really fanatical Clinton cultists, I mean--is a product of slow news periods. No, it's clearly much easier to believe in a nationwide conspiracy of evil, wealthy Jewish Lectoids who preferred that Joe Biden won and intervened to steal the election from Trump, while leaving no trace of their dastardly plot and making the whole thing look like just another election. Yes, depending on how you're grading these things, season 2 could be seen as just as bad. If one is looking at the stupidity of the writing, I think season 3 is the worst at that, by far. As far as being dull and little happening, both seasons are guilty. As far as bad moves, I can't imagine why writers, given a zombie apocalypse with which to work on a weekly basis (a first of its kind, as you say) decided, after a 6 episode first season, to then immediately write the zombie apocalypse out of the story and leave it out for nearly the entirety of the next season, but to be fair, Frank Darabont initially had a VERY different idea for how season 2 should go, one that sounded far better but that was, by circumstances, sequentially abandoned. His original "Blackhawk Down With Zombies" ep with which he wanted to kick off that season sounded great. That was vetoed. Then, his next idea, which would have taken the characters into Atlanta, was shot but abandoned and never aired, for reasons that were never made particularly clear. What we got for the season 2 opener, then, was a version of what was supposed to be the 3rd ep of the season, one that was then padded with entirely extraneous material--dulled down--to make it a 90-minute ep. "1. He did NOT call Mexicans killers and rapists of white people." I see. It was all just a figment of the imagination of literally everyone: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/theyre-rapists-presidents-trump-campaign-launch-speech-two-years-later-annotated/ "2. He did NOT call for a complete ban of muslims entering the US." His exact words are that he's "calling for a total and complete shut-down of Muslims entering the United States": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDffWUjcBA Trump's campaign manager said this applied across the board, even to tourists: https://twitter.com/Santucci/status/673983483505602561 Try your gaslighting on someone else. Season 1 is, among other things, where all the timeline problems began. Rick had to be in the hospital less than 2 weeks--he still had an open wound and was still able to walk around and perform complex tasks, but everything else was indicating it had been much longer, and a scientist even says, at one point, it had been 6 1/2 months! These were probably just quality-control problems initially, but they kept turning up in the later seasons, indicating that no one involved in the writing, post-Darabont, really even cared about what they were writing. And boy, did THAT ever start to show in every aspect of the series! Season 3 stands out as the absolute worst season of the show, as far as bad/cretinous writing is concerned. Every episode was some new collection of inanities, with 2 or 3 minutes of plot stretched into entire hours; by the end of the season, the writers were doing so little work that, it was later revealed, production had to be repeatedly shut down. "I don't know where you got that, but I never heard Trump nor any of my fellow Trump supporters say anything liket that." Trump's entire 2020 campaign was to go around telling people that if Democrats won, they would literally end America, murder Republicans in the streets, kill their families, burn their churches and businesses and allow a terrorist siege-state against white rightists, while simultaneously claiming Democrats were working to cheat and "steal" the election (the toxic combo that eventually led to 6 Jan.). He has always preached hatred, protofascism and the real thing. He began his 2016 campaign by calling Mexicans killers and rapists of white people and said the Mexican government was involved in a conspiracy to ship such people to the U.S.. He explained how American Muslims danced in celebration in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11. He called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S.. He regularly encouraged his supporters to violently assault those who disagreed with him, These things were central to his campaign. His stock stump speech, for the last 2 years is just hatred of Dems, liberals, progressives, "the left." He rants against Democrats and tells his white followers, "This isn't their country, this is YOUR country." It's also the case that having Trumpian protofascism "represented in national policy" in any sort of hegemonic way would literally end the liberal society, so there would no longer any question of anyone's rights or interests being represented. <i>“Donald Trump has conditioned … a pretty serious majority of the Republican base to believe that any legal critique of him, any external charge made against him is invalid and a product of the ‘deep state’ or a conspiracy of some kind to take him away from Republican voters,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.</i> And here's what the rightists of the Lincoln Project can't seem to bring themselves to admit: right-wing media is responsible for that conditioning. Right-wing media has used the brainwashing techniques of cults, filling their followers' heads with toxic fantasies while making a daily theme of isolating those followers from any information-stream outside the cult. That's what Wilson is describing in those comments. But Trump didn't do that; he merely exploited the situation created by that media apparatus--the same apparatus the high-profile Republican insiders of the Lincoln Project were happy to exploit for decades when it served their interests (getting people to vote Republican). I see... "The Republican assault on free and fair elections instigated by Donald Trump is gathering pace, with efforts to sabotage the normal workings of American democracy sweeping state legislatures across the US. "A year that began with the violent insurrection at the US Capitol is ending with an unprecedented push to politicize, criminalize or in other ways subvert the nonpartisan administration of elections. A year-end report from pro-democracy groups identifies no fewer than 262 bills introduced in 41 states that hijack the election process. "Of those, 32 bills have become law in 17 states." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/23/voter-suppression-election-interference-republicans Trump's supporters aren't, by and large, a bunch of evil bastards (though there are plenty of those). They're people who have been victimized by, among other things, a powerful, agenda-driven media apparatus that takes advantage of them and fills their heads with poison for political reasons. But that apparatus just did this so they'd vote Republican and those behind it never realized the fascist monster they were creating by what they were preaching until it was too late. Never get confused on the source of the hatred in this. <i>Some trump supporters remain loyal to him because they refuse to acknowledge the truth about his narcissistic/fascist mentality, which is also true about themselves and why they refuse to acknowledge it exists in ANY of them.</i> That's totally inaccurate. That particular part of his base--the hardcore Trumpers--remain loyal to him precisely <i>because</i> of "his narcissistic/fascist mentality." That's a feature--THE feature--not a bug. The only thing Repub voters of this species demand of a politician is that he hates and wants to screw over the same people those Repub voters have been conditioned by right-wing media to hate and to want to screw over. On that score--the only score that matters to them--Trump delivers. Almost no one in the regular corporate press understood that in 2016, including, early on, those in far-right media that had created those conditions. It's fascism--seething, furious hatred of the liberal society and any manifestation of it and the desire to crush it. It's a godawful movie--a straight-up remake of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. If you were going to just rip off a Marvel movie, why not rip off one of the good ones, instead of (arguably) the worst one Marvel ever made? WW throws in some stuff swiped from THOR also but not enough to help. And it's REALLY stupid. Correct. Except most of them could be made today. The reworked effects are, for the most part, pretty cool. What sucked about those "enhanced" versions is that they removed large chunks of the episodes themselves. I don't know if they fixed this on their second release but it was a dealbreaker for me on the first. Trumpism, MAGA-ism, DeSantis-ism, etc. are strongly proto-fascist and lurch into the real thing with alarming regularity. I've long pointed out that Trump preaches fascism; these days, he's gone even further down the Nazi rat-hole, talking about "America is our country, not theirs"–referring to other Americans–and pushing beautification projects, a new "baby-boom," a purge of internal dissidents. DeSantis is trying to Orban-ize Florida, while right-wing figures have been holding up Orban's authoritarian rule as a model. The break a lot of this makes with real fascism is in the advocacy of redemptive violence but even that has increasingly given way in the last few years. If it needs to be said, don't hold your breath waiting for any real reply to that. Antifa isn't "anarchist"; it's a squad of Irish setters who've been trained to deal cards. See how that works, and how helpful it is? You mean the actual definition of fascism, as opposed to this thing you've just made up and to which you've randomly applied the word. No, that's not fascism. At all. It's sort of the sublimation of the work of a lot of scholars and an effort to put the matter in a brief, general, relatively simple way anyone can understand. I wrote the first version of it more than 6 years ago. I'll probably continue with the subject.