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"...does anyone else look at bigbang-theory and think "wtf, WHEN are we gonna be done with this shit?"

Definitely.Those guys are a horrible parody of a decades old caricature of people with in depth technical and scientific skills (geeks). They are nerds, rather than geeks; socially inept (a creep, a social mute, a loser and a robot), and well into the autism spectrum. It's pretty insulting stuff.

All the geeks I know are very sociable, articulate and generally interesting / fun people.

But then again, what can you expect from the guy who gave us Two and a Half Men?

> Galileo Galilei finally got forgiven by the Catholic church, when Pope Paul admitted the churches "errors" the church made - almost 400 years later.

He didn't get in trouble for writing about astronomy in the first place, but for writing nasty caricatures of people (including the Pope, who happened to be a friend of his in spite of this...). Also, they knew and expected a stellar parallax. The fact that the nearest star is an insane distance away made stellar parallax too small to measure for quite some time and, once it was measured, heliocentrism became widely accepted.

As you say, political errors take quite some time to work their way out of the system.

Are you an example of a generation with a distorted view of the world and a lack of empathy for the less well off due to growing up with servants?

I don't lack empathy for the less well off. I described in detail my frustration at the fact that they do not vote in their own interest. Unlike many other nations which do not have anything close to a democracy, we are fortunate enough to have a democracy. It is not without it's problems, but just about any change could be affected simply by voting. We don't need to storm a government building under a hail of gunfire and risking losing our lives to take back our government from corporations. All we need to do is vote, and we just don't care enough. When I used the "In a democracy the people get the government we deserve", I was including myself in "the people".

If not, exactly what is your damage, and why are you passing it off as acceptable and the values that built the USA as "communism"?

You said this in response to this:

It would be easy for me to take one sentence fragment from your post, and then label it as a Stalin-style communism apology, and ridicule it as such, but this is a pretty childish debate tactic.

If you read this closely, you'll see that I was not calling anything communism. I was describing what the opposite side of the same coin of your caricature looks like. The idea that the world is only Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalists and Stalinist communists is a false dichotomy. People don't fit only in these 2 boxes. I was criticizing this debate tactic of attempting to cast someone into one of these 2 boxes and then simply attacking the strawman of extreme capitalism or extreme socialism.

I am not an ideologue. In terms of capitalism and socialism, I don't think either is evil or the complete solution. I care about what's fair and what works.

Braves not really. Denotes a role, or position, and doesn't really have any negative associations.
Now the caricature that the team uses....that's another issue.

How on Earth does that term caricature anyone? It's a fucking statement of fact. Get over it.

offensive, pleasant, enjoyable, abrasive, etc... are mutually exclusive to objective. Also caricatures are almost always offensive to theirs subjects and that is by design.

Of course there are wrong opinions.

Just because opinions are subjective does not mean they can't also be wrong.

Your not offended by it or don't find it offensive? That's great.

That doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed, if it can be demonstrated to be objectively offensive to the people it caricatures.

Heh, cool :D I guess that explains why they both have better caricatures of american culture than the Americans could pull off :P

How was it that the main character had such terrible Russian voice acting, whereas all the other Russians and even the Thai prostitute had more authentic accents? That was another thing that sort of drove us up the wall about GTA4 :P

OK, I'll say something nice about GTA4... I did get a chuckle out of the achievement tracking for flying things under bridges... that was something missing from most flying games :P

I don't care how right you are, it's your self-righteous and smug tone that inclines me to vote against you.

This is sarcasm, right? You're presenting an unfair caricature of a climate skeptic to discredit them, yes?

It won't get money out of politics. If this group manages to accomplish everything they propose, we'll just go back to the old way of unlimited donation options for unions, limited or no donations options for anyone else.

Since there is a distinct effort to hide any actual details about what this PAC supports, here's some information on the founder. He's not a caricature of a political philosophy, but the timings and his biography make it pretty clear what he's trying to do.

Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.

I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".

There's a lot more history to suggest that Christ was a real person than there is to dismiss it.

And no, some random Joe Sixpack saying he's an atheist doesn't mean that Christ didn't exist. Most of these religious figures were real people. If the question is were they the people that history has made them out to be? Well, doubtlessly the answer is no but that's also true for the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Ho Chi Minh as well.

I believe Neptune, Zeus, and Hades are caricatures based on real humans.

I think this is pointing at a larger cultural issue: The "Humanities" disappeared down a post-modern rabbit hole of nonsense. It's become widely held by "experts" that classics are all bullshit and only the most novel works are interesting. Paintings aren't important unless it's an abstract piece painted with feces. Literature isn't interesting unless it's incomprehensible. Philosophy isn't worth talking about unless it's mathematically provable.

These subjects have the potential to be incredibly interesting and even important to our lives, but instead it's relegated to pseudo-science and trivia, and as a result, a lot of the "expert" PhDs don't know what the hell they're talking about.

This must be that new definition of "widely held" that means "here are some caricatures of minority views".

That's right, everyone talks like a dated comedy caricature. As indeed they do in every corner of the UK. Everyone at all times.

Hint: Google "Ali G", "Worzel Gummidge" or "Eliza Doolittle".

How can you be accurate about something you don't believe in?
A caricature is intended to denigrate. If it didn't it wouldn't be a caricature but rather a characterisation.

it's not about denigrating, it's about caricaturing. The sky giant is a caricature, and a caricature is a portrait where various characteristics are exaggerated to draw attention to them. BTW when I use the word god I tend to use it in the plural, since I think it is more accurate that way.

Have a TV show with an idiot bumbling wife and a patient dad and watch the complaints fly

I don't know about that. I've seen "The Goldbergs" which is basically The Wonder Years except a sitcom and set in the 80s. The mother is bat shit insane and hyper over-protective; a caricature of the "Jewish mother." The father is fairly even keeled. I haven't heard shrill complaints about it.

I remember watching RotJ ad intensely disliking the Ewok scenes. They still seem absurd, pointless and jarring, and are one of the reasons RotJ is the lesser of the original three films. Yoda, on the other hand, was one of the breakout characters of the whole franchise; wise, powerful and a bit cranky, pretty much a kung fu master transplanted into a galaxy far far away.

But Jar Jar was a whole other level of awful. First of all, he was, whether Lucas intended it or not, a horrible racial caricature, but even if you look beyond that, he literally serves no purpose. As a comic foil, which C3PO was so successfully in the first films, he just stunk. Lucas clearly didn't like him, as he spent a good deal of script space having the other characters abuse him, culminating in Jar Jar selling out the whole bloody Republic by recommending to the Senate that they give Palpatine unlimited powers. C3PO and R2D2 may have been comic foils, much as the characters they were based on from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, but they were still, by and large, loyal and trusted companions. Jar Jar was a pathetic idiot intensely disliked by everyone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/13/ayn-rand-was-not-a-defender-of-the-rich/

"Ayn Rand, the famous novelist and free market advocate, is often caricatured as a defender of the rich or big business. But, as Steve Horwitz explains at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog, there are more wealthy villains in her books than wealthy heroes. And many of her heroes – including John Galt, whom Rand portrayed as the person best exemplifying her philosophy – are not particularly wealthy. Ultimately, Rand’s work praises producers, not wealthy people as such:

        One of the other valuable pieces of Rand’s work is also one of the most frequently misunderstood by her critics.

        [T]he view [of many critics] is that Rand supposedly loved the rich and hated the poor, and that Atlas Shrugged is a story of the rich as Nietzschean heroes who should be freed to save the world from the mooching poor and middle class.

        This, of course, is simply wrong. It’s not “the rich” who go on strike, but the producers. The good and evil divide for Rand is not between rich and poor, but between producers and takers. There is no remotely plausible reading of Atlas Shrugged where the “1%” are unambiguously heroes and where everyone else is a “moocher.” One can simply list off various characters who don’t fit this reading. Most obvious is John Galt himself. None of the descriptions of him that Rand offers suggest that he is rich. Comfortable? Yes. But rich? Nope. Francisco D’Anconia and Hank Rearden are arguably rich, but Hugh Akston? He doesn’t seem to be particularly so. On the other side of the ledger we have Jim Taggart. Clearly rich, but clearly a villain. Wesley Mouch has clearly done well for himself and is arguably rich, as are many of the other villains who associate with him. They are the ones attending the fancy parties and living the high life while the producers are, for the most part, out running railroads, extracting oil, and inventing new useful metals. "

But yea, conservatives are teh totes rich peeople.

It didn't start that way. In fact, there's a distinct correlation to the increasing age of George Lucas and the increasing "hijinks" of his characters and/or the ephemeral nature of the characters he introduces. JarJar is just the cataclysmic conclusion of a string of bad decisions that had a truly promising start.

In order, ep. 4 has witty repartee between Threepio and Artoo, somewhat diluted by SE retcons. This is the par excellence of their performances. You'll see that ep. 5 is where Threepio starts "hamming it up", but in a self-aware manner. A caricature of uptight British absurdism that doesn't take itself too seriously, played well as the "straight man" opposite of Artoo's escapades. Then in ep. 6, we get a par performance from Threepio with somewhat more heroic notions from Artoo. In a way, the Ewoks took the burden from the droid duo for providing the comedy/tragedy aspects of the third film. For the droids, those performances worked well enough and didn't take away from the story.

It all goes to shit with the prequels. Artoo is immediately framed as a "tragic hero" in ep. 1 because of the apparent slavery/fodder undertones of Astromech Droids overall. Thereby delivering a heavy-handed message of oppression and strife, "humanizing" this artificial-life character. Threepio, as the invention of young Anakin, is supposedly imbued with the values and morals of young Anakin, but doesn't explain how Threepio is unique from the protocol droids have been mass-produced for millennia. It's like building a toaster out of Erector/Technix parts... what was the point, exactly? Oh, right... it's a conveniently close-knit origin story that way. This film does little more than get principal franchise characters (Anakin, Obi Wan, Artoo, Threepio and Yoda) together by the end of the story. JarJar is introduced. He's inserted into the story as both a "CGI triumph" and as the sad clown. (I. Hate. Clowns.) In a way, it was JarJar that pushed Threepio into the "uptight ninny" niche that ultimately doomed him as a character and prevented any kind of humorous moments from Artoo throughout the prequel films. JarJar took over that job... kind of appropriate, considering the outsourcing epidemic that was happening at the time.

Then we get to the travesty of ep. 2; the Republic Army of Clones. (they didn't "attack" anyone, really... and it's a clear evasion of the obvious "Clone Wars" title, which would have made tons of sense based on canon, but was "strategically reserved" for a later animated television series.) If you can somehow manage to keep your last meal down and endure the frigid romance of Padme and Anakin for at least an hour, you'll see that the relatively minimal screen-time with the droids has been "lubed up" with predictable, over-the-top and depressingly corny gags. These two characters are ruined for being made into even shallower caricatures of themselves. There are zero moments with Artoo and Threepio that had to be written that way for the sake of storyline. Zero. Their abominable performances in this film were entirely by choice, and it was a very, very poor choice indeed. JarJar didn't even make up for it, he's now just a piece of the background. There's nothing less satisfying than to see a pathetic comedy-relief character turn into bland scenery. There's no real dichotomy here; JarJar doesn't offset Threepio in any way. And at this point, neither does Artoo. It's all ruined.

Now there's that lingering aftertaste; ep. 3. It's almost embarrassing to think of it, but it's the latest SW franchise feature-length motion picture to date. (*shudder*) While it has a most heroic opening, (Artoo... yes, again) this story later unfolds with almost no droids at all, and doesn't even really leverage them for comic relief. This was like putting ep. 5 after ep. 6 -- giving us a dark finish to a hopeful segway. The visual-gag moments we're given with Artoo and Threepio only reinforce the two-dimensional cutouts we laboriously endured in ep. 2. Nothing new to see here. JarJar is all but m