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The show is OK, but isn't really for geeks and none of the characters are much like any geek I've ever known.

I'm a physicist in Pasadena. I know more than a few people like each of the characters, and may or may not be similar to some of them.

The first three seasons were pretty good, and there are (or at least were) quite a few physics in-jokes, but it's hard to maintain something like that and they've turned most of the characters into caricatures of their earlier season versions.

Um, they do have a live studio audience [imgur.com]

Yes, they make a big deal about their "live studio audience", but that doesn't mean it isn't annoying as hell. In fact, I'd prefer it if they used a laugh track, because at least then they'd adjust it so it doesn't sound like a bunch of inebriated hyenas. Of course, just because they have an audience doesn't mean it isn't rigged:

A friend of mine has been to a taping of the show. They spend 20-30 minutes getting the audience ready with a stand-up comedian and other fluffers. Their whole purpose is to get the audience excited and in a laughing mood. They really pile on the hype about their laughter making the show successful and how important the reaction is. They talk about the microphones needing big loud laughs. Etc.

When the show finally starts filming, it's a rare scene that's filmed in one take. Therefore when the show is edited, they will independently choose the "best" laugh and use that for final take. In that sense they do use an edited laugh track, it's just one that's created by the current audience.

Then there's the dialog pacing, which is constructed to suit the exaggerated laughing instead of the comedy. This awkwardly false nature can be easily seen if you take away the laugh track or (less subtley) replace it with a caricature laugh. This is a problem with a lot of sitcoms, but Big Bang Theory seems to be especially bad.

Now take a look at John Cleese's approach on handling audience laughter while filming Fawlty Towers. Here's an example from A Room with a View. Compared to that, Big Bang Theory feels stilted and forced, while Fawlty Towers has a more natural rhythm that's so much easier to laugh at.

Of course, it also helps that Fawlty Towers had good writing and actually is funny. Two things Big Bang Theory can rarely claim.

The reason fashion show dresses are so ugly is pretty much the same as the reason why concept cars are so impractical. These fashion designers are basically looking for a job and the chain stores and fashion houses want someone edgy, who can design a dress that's *just* a bit ahead of the curve compared to the competition. Problem is, such a dress won't stand out enough compared to the competition, so fashion designers have to try to be even more outrageous. Essentially they're caricaturing the dresses they're actually going to design if they get noticed and land a job.

"Was the whole point of this submission to take a shot at the U.S.?"

Yeah, pretty much.

Slashdot is a pretty provincial, chauvinistic and bigoted publication... as long as these qualities are directed in an anti-US manner.

Basically, if the Slashdot crowd looked at itself in the mirror, the the ugly bigoted and uninformed face it would see staring back at it would look surprisingly close to the stereotyped caricatures that it pretends only apply to those evil "Muricans".

Or he knew exactly what he was doing, and is a liberal actually creating a strawman caricature to make Rs look that careless. Pretty sure both sides do that -it's like a double agent kind of thing.

Some of them may promote alternative energy sources, but the rest will protest against wind turbines killing birds and solar panels being environmentally unfriendly to produce. The Green movement isn't consistently for anything. They are only consistently against things.

But that's just more of the if-you-oppose-nuclear-power-you're-a-crazy-hippie-luddite caricaturing I was talking about. You're going to have a hard time finding an environmentalist that wouldn't trade all the damage done by mining coal and uranium, and the byproducts of turning them into electricity, for the (overblown) risk to birds from wind turbines. Maybe you're thinking of some of the nuttier members of the Audubon Society? You know, the minority of which tries to poison feral cats to protect songbirds.

Science isn't supposed to be fun.

Speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and who is currently working in a scientific laboratory (as in, it's Sunday afternoon and I'm literally sitting at my desk in lab while I type this), this statement comes as a surprise to me.

I definitely didn't choose it for my health (viz. I'm working in lab on a Sunday afternoon), and the money certainly isn't all that great. "Fame and fortune" are not really in the cards, either (there's no Kaley Cuoco knocking on my door) - the most I can hope for is respect among my peer group in the rather narrow field I'm in. Given the current science funding climate and the abundance of Ph.D.s in my field, job certainty also isn't all that grand either.

So why am I doing it? Because I enjoy it. Because there is immense satisfaction in staring the world in the face and wrestling knowledge from it's byzantine grasp. Is science a laugh a minute and all excitement? Certainly not. It can be slow, tedious, and at points soul crushing. I have yet to meet a scientist who doesn't look at their time as a Ph.D. candidate and think that most of it was a pointless waste. And still ... "third time pays for all", as they say, and the good times outweigh the bad. It *is* enjoyable, and any time I forget that, I just need to go to a seminar where a colleague is presenting their latest research, and I'm reminded about how fun and interesting this whole enterprise really is.

So I, as a scientist, completely reject your statement that "science isn't supposed to be fun". If you're dong it right, it *is* fun and it *should* be. But it's fun in the same way that playing sports is fun - you have moment of glory in the game, but tempered by hard work and perseverance during practice, with an underlying satisfaction about doing a job right. It's not nonstop excitement, but then neither is anything else in the world.

I certainly agree that the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd really doesn't understand science -- but in part that's due to the very way we're teaching science that's being decried in the article. Science is presented as amazing knowledge bequeathed upon the world by mysterious adepts. The "How come? Why? What's this?" attitude which is really the core of science is replaced by "Thus sayeth SCIENCE!" proclamations. Actual scientist who do actual science have a much more "play like" attitude to the process: "what happens when I do X?" "I want to tweak X, Y and Z, and figure out what happens." The grade school formalism of "scientific methodology" is a caricature of what actually happens (much like the "how a bill becomes a law" story is a caricature). And this stilted formalism only serves to cement the image of scientist as stolid masters of arcana whose word is "truth".

So, yeah, ccience is a method, and it is rigorous, but it's fun, too. And people would be better off if they understood why it's fun.

You can't possibly be a real person! It's like a caricature of someone so destroyed by that which they hate, that they become an even greater evil. Your hatred of hipsters has caused you to become a vile, filth-spewing menace to polite society.

Penny Arcade had something to say on this kind of thing. Sad thing is that they're right.

You can't possibly be a real person! It's like a caricature of someone so destroyed by that which they hate, that they become an even greater evil. Your hatred of hipsters has caused you to become a vile, filth-spewing menace to polite society.

you must admit however that the demonization of the ferengis (and all other characterizations of stereotypes) was IMHO morally and ethically balanced with later un-demonization, i.e. the Quark character in DS9. Quark's lovability was IMO the perfect completion of what could have ended up as you described - stupid demonization. By the end of DS9, one even had some sympathy for the low level grunts (and even a prostitute O'Brien chose not to have sex with) in the Orion syndicate. Trek was not about demonization or ham handed scenarios and caricatures. But without investing a disturbing number hours of watching the show, it is extremely easy to see how someone can get that idea. Don't judge a 10,000 page sci-fi book series by its first chapter.

The fault of this dumbing down is the growth of marketing and their latest paradigm: the customer is always a moron. In the early days it wasn't that it was a more liberal society, but that people making TV or news or anything for the intellect knew that people were quite smart and could understand things and therefore didn't have to be talked down to or pandered at the lowest common denominator (despite "There's a sucker born every minute", this merely acknowledged that some people can be dumb if you're smart enough to find them).

Nowadays, though, marketing "knows" people are thicker than a yard of lard. They believe the manipulations of sales pitches and advertising, for chrissakes! And the homily is now "Nobody ever went wrong underestimating the intelligence of the average audience".

So making TV shows, it has to be shallow because marketing believes everyone you can get to watch must be dumb, and marketing gets the TV show a slot, because the adverts are from marketing, and that is where the revenue comes in, so if a TV show isn't pandering, it doesn't get aired because marketing says it won't generate enough revenue.

Even if the tv show producers used to be "Fuck it, lets do it anyway" and got a crappy slot, the fact it made less was "proof" for marketing that the show was bad, not that it was a crappy slot. So executives saw proof of marketing's genius. Many or most of them have been in marketing or done training that embodies marketing paradigms.

Producers who don't produce profitable content don't get jobs. Producers who do produce profitable content DO get jobs. So now you have producers who "know" that they must make dumbass programming and don't even consider "midbrow" stuff. So you have marketing given the power to greenlight a show, executives who hired marketing to tell them how to increase revenue listening to them, then producers who think like marketing getting ahead because their shows are greenlighted often, then scriptwriters who generate ideas that producers will accept become the norm.

And, eventually, you have a huge sea of talent that have no absorbed the idea as an entire worldview that everyone on the planet is as dumb as a stump and that you must always strive to pander to the stupidity, otherwise it won't work.

Hence the steady decline of anything intellectual (and entertainment IS intellectual too, unless you're acting in the play or part of the band, etc) drops from the, well 50s, really, to the 2000's "Big Brother/DealorNoDeal" lowbrow noise content.

In the 50's, sure, it was wierd. Presenters were like lecturers, and not actual presenters like you get today, where they engage you in what they are saying. But the actual content made no attempt to pander. Cartoons and slapstick comedies were lowbrow, but aimed not at the lowest common denominator, but at those who liked slapstick or cartoons. Live action series had "Brought to you by Glaxnar's Human Rinds!" but didn't think that putting the can of pepsi in the hand of the lead actor was all that was needed to make your dumb ass think of buying pepsi. The series also felt free to do social commentary or crude comedy or dark satire or high education. Even, often, in the same series. Because it wasn't assumed if you liked "I dream of Jeanie" that you would be scared or confused or put off if there was some social commentary in some episodes.

Nowadays, such content would "damage" the profitability, as far as marketing's paradigms knew it, therefore maximising profit means NEVER putting that sort of "off message" content in there.

Even the caricatured knuckledragging moron can accept or enjoy a little social commentary in their "Tits, guns and fast cars" cop show. If it were ALL social commentary, they'd not bother to watch it, but it won't make them run away to see something about how the "hero cop" leaps to a conclusion about a black guy being the bad guy and finding out that they weren't after a tragedy. As long as there's also tits, guns and fast cars and the cops arrest the bad guy, bringing justice to the mean streets, they're fine with it. And maybe a little more open to the existence of hidden bias and its downsides.

Or the subtlety of TNG episode where everyone on an alien planet is genderless, but some of them lean more towards one gender or another. Or the subtlety of the entire Ferrengi race, for that matter, which was almost a literal demonization of capitalism (greedy, deceptive, ugly, backstabbing, cowardly, and sexist to boot).

Star Trek writers could have used a bit of restraint in creating these ham-handed scenarios and caricatures. I liked Star Trek in spite of its ridiculous political and social preaching, not because of it.

Muslims will counter this claim by stating Muhammad was an illiterate, but that's probably not the case.

No. Muslims, especially the radical ones, will simply start chopping off the heads of anyone that disagrees. It's all horseshit. I lump those idiots into the same boat as Smith's Magic Glasses of Mormonism, the Brainwashed Idiots Book of Lies and Exaggerations (BIBLE), and L. Ron Hubbard's Tax Evasion Religion called Scientology.

It's all bullshit. At least Christianity, Mormonism and Scientology doesn't chop off heads or kill people for drawing some visage of Mohammed. If I thought I could get away with it, I would create a nice HTML5 website that allows you to

1 - pick any book of religion of your choice, pull up a digital image of any page and let you virtually burn the fucking thing in a nice puff of digital smoke. Preferably using an animation of a hot, naked man or woman (you pick) setting it on fire.

2 - Add a nice web game cartoon of putting MoMo himself into a cage and poking him with sticks and when you're tired clicking a button and having wild boars appear in the cage and tearing his bearded ass apart with him screaming. Or every thousandth click on the kill button makes one of the boars get amorous and he starts having sex with him before he gets eaten.

3 - A game of "Piss on the Scientology Symbol" like one of those shooter games in a carnival. The winning score gets animated caricatures of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and some other well known weak minded Hubbard Believers running around and shooting flying Qurans with laser pistols. ...and anything else I can find that violates the sanctity of any sacred cow and pisses some "believer" off at the most visceral level possible.

The two-state solution is not anti-zionist. Since it maintains the jewishness of the main state it is acceptable to a broad range of the Israeli public as well as to a large part of the international players and international public. The interpretation about the makeup of the second state varies a lot though: the more left wing Israelis will accept a larger Palestinian state but rarely a real state that would be armed, contiguous and viable. The facts on the ground point towards a Bantustan of disconnected statelets that cannot survive without external help.

The one state solution is anti-zionist if it does away with the jewishness of the state and transforms the state in one of its citizens as the US or France have.
That idea is unacceptable for liberal zionism. That is, in principle, not because it would be unfeasible.
There is also a rightwing interpretation of a one-state-solution, although they aren't thinking of a Jeffersionian democracy.
Thers's also post-zionism, which can mean anything from liberal zionism to antizionism.

The idea that a Palestinian state would be committed to Jewish genocide is a racist caricature.

Oh please no.

GQ is considered by many to be the best Star Trek film to date.

It is one of my favorite films.

The original film managed to be a perfect homage to ST:TOS, the fans surrounding it, without utterly destroying it like the Austin Powers parodies did to spy thrillers everywhere.

Obviously a big part of the movie is the "Fish out of water" of having "Actors, not astronauts". And, simply, you can only have that once.

The characters outside of their roles are basically uninteresting, they're not "heroes", they're not even "everyman". And watching them continue to muddle their way through the universe, trying to parody and pantomime their archetypes -- no. I can't see. They'll just pummel the delightful players that they were and drive headlong in to as extreme a stereotype as they can be.

Where GQ treated the community around TOS with respect, I look at the Abrahms Star Trek and the clown caricatures they came off to be. More Heroic! More Scottish! More Vulcan! Damnit Jim, I more a Doctor than I am an Auto Mechanic. Just dreadful.

So, anyway, no, I can't see it. GQ is a jewel and it's not designed to go under the microscope that a series will put it through.

"Did you ever watch the show?" -- Guy

Only if you're a complete liar

Rabidly screeching insults when someone disagrees doesn't actually support your argument.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips

If you replace the two reformed baptist churches with, say MRA and RedPill respectively, that is pretty much how it looks to anyone outside the "movement". IOW they are peddling the exact same type of toxic crap, but for some inexplicable[*] reason they've separated into factions which *loathe* each other based on some almost insignificant ideological difference.

So you can call me a liar if you wish, but to me and many others they are so similar as to be not worth distinguishing between.

The 99.9% of things in common they believe is what distinguishes them. Franky the 0.1% vehement disagreements between the various groups are so small as to be irrelevant to anyone not actually in those groups.

Feminists use the slur "neckbeard", which draws on racialized caricatures and repurposes them.

Well, Feminists stole that from us then. Nerds have been calling nerds neckbeards for as long as I've been flaming away on usenet and IRC. Come to think of it I don't think I've ever personally encountered a non-nerd saying it. As a nerd who's hung around with man nerds, all recognise of the slovenly, smug, superior fellow who is so ungromed he has unkempt hair sprouting from his neck. That's a nerd term from nerd culture. Trying to pass it off as some feminist thing is blatant rewriting of history and frankly dishonest.

This is a humerous take on what neckbeardery is all about

http://www.buzzfeed.com/skelli...

And the heading picture? The slovenly, ponytailed unkempt and superior comic book guy from the Simpsons. Feminism doesn't rear it's head anywhere on that entire page.

[*]I say inexplicable, but of course humans do this all the time. There's no hate quite like the hate between two incredibly similar groups who split on some minute issue.

If yo've been following any of this, it's quite clear Vox Day and his ilk espouse much the same in the way of toxic views as the MRA/RedPill/MGTOW/etc crowd. MRA is as convenient a label as any since they all behave in more or less identical ways.

Only if you're a complete liar who needs to delegitimize one of those because they threaten the monopoly your toxic hate movement has on all discourse, funding, and even morality itself. MRAs are diametrically opposed to Redpillers on virtually everything except that they both have a problem with feminists. Redpillers, like feminists, judge men solely based on their success with women. To a feminist a man's worth is judged by how loyal of a kapo he is, to a redpiller it's how much sex he has. Both use being unsuccessful with (or unattractive to) women as their ultimate insult. Feminists use the slur "neckbeard", which draws on racialized caricatures and repurposes them. Redpillers use the insult "beta".

But a big part of it is the rabid puppies are in fact a bunch of raving mysoginists who hate anyone who is't a straight, whte, Chriatian male. Their fearless leader (Vox Day) holds those views loudly and proudly. He's never tried to deny it and frequently makes such comments. See here for his own views in his own words on homosexuality for example:

I'm not Vox Day. Vox Day also agreeing the Hugos are rigged by a toxic clique of social justice pretenders is about as relevant to the point as Hitler passing animal cruelty legislation is to my volunteering with a shelter.

And if you really think this is still the case, then explain why the blogger who outed RH and documented her awfulness got a Hugo for her efforts.

The real question is why it took that much to finally get SJWs to stop supporting this person in the frist place.

The problem is that SJWs can't tolerate people enjoying themselves. If you aren't specifically for their agenda, then you're problematic and need to be ousted.

Indeed, we can't tolerate the SJWs and must oust them, their agenda must be opposed! They are the problem!

Did you write a story with rape in it? Then that's problematic. It doesn't matter how well you wrote it, it is always problematic.

Yes, it pretty much is, rape being a difficult subject to handle well. Would you expect otherwise? It'd be unauthentic if it wasn't.

Why doesn't your medieval European fantasy story include black people? Because you're racist.

Why does your medieval European fantasy story reflect nothing in the way of the actual ethnic tensions that occurred during that time period? Why does your medieval European fantasy story caricature black people in a way that fits a minstrel show? Or Jews? Or Poles? Or Vikings? Or Pagans?

No, it's just bland knights, singing peasants, and nobody thinks twice over it?

Ok, you're at least writing for elementary schoolers, right?

Wait, no, you're trying to make some larger point?

Where are your strong women warriors despite that historically there aren't that many of them? You're a misogynist.

Why are all the competent and desirable women in your story complacent types who want only to be housewives and mothers, and mockingly spurn the trouble-making liberal women who aren't very attractive and who clearly don't know their place?

Why do all the women in your story just sit around and swoon after the men?

And so on and so on.

And so on and so on...

Ayn Randian here. I like this because it cuts away huge swathes of state apparatus, all the civil servants and evaluators deciding who is worthy or not. [...]

You're aware Ayn Rand hated Libertarians, right?
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-...

People constantly attempt to paint Libertarians as Objectivists, but to Ayn Rand they were very different, and anarchy was anathema to her:

"All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. " -- Ayn Rand

Personally, I think it should require a test before you are allowed to read Ayn Rand; you must at least recognize that the people in her books where caricatures, rather than representations of real people, or you could easily be sucked into the flawed philosophy of Objectivism, with no way to realize that it was flawed, and more than a Christian is capable of recognizing that "Intelligent Design" is just a renamed version of Creationism, dressed up in different clothes and a fake mustache.

Either way, you are either an Objectivist or you are a Libertarian, but you are not both.

I think he's been a public personallity for so long that he's had a hard time not shaping his message as a political persona. Some of that I think is his appeal, but he needs to strike a fine line between being himself and becoming a caricature of himself.

I think his real weakness will be lack of any real policy depth. I'm pretty sure he has ideas and believes that every problem is just another business opportuntiy where a deal can be struck that profits everybody. I don't know, though, that public policy is necessarily a topic that can treated as just a bunch of one-off deals but instead requires a little more depth.

I suppose it's possible he could surround himself with the right policy experts (all Presidents ultimately do) but then who's policy is it?