I've started calling them 'Don't tax, just spend' Republicans.
Remember when the fight was whether or not national healthcare would cost too much? And how much welfare did cost? Remember when the budget was the important thing?
Don't we all look silly arguing about how many hundreds of millions social programs would cost, when we can apparently spend billions on a war while lowering taxes! Stupid us.
Except that Americans have unenumerated rights. (Rights not specifically listed.)
And thus it's not insanity to look to other countries to see what rights those people have when trying to define unenumerated ones. (Considering that's where our listings of rights came from in the first place.)
This is why I think Roe vs. Wade was one of the dumbest moves in a long time, and protecting it is dumber still.
It's made the left compromise on so many things. And created this huge movement on the right eventually leading us to where we are now, religious control of a large part of the electorate.
One damn single issue that's simply not that important.
If it had been ignored, most states would have legalized it by now, and people living in Alabama and Mississippi would just have to go to another state.
You get rid of the nutcakes on charge of your party, and the Democrats can stop desperately throwing faces at the wall and hoping one of them sticks.
Dean is an attempt to keep the Greens and Reforms from shooting them in the leg every time they kneel down at the starting line. You'll notice he didn't get the nomination, he's just an attempt to applease the people disgusted with both parties. It's saying 'Look, the Democrats will work with you people. Please stop shooting at us.'.
And Kerry's not an idiot, he's a politician. He was playing the 'King of the Center' that presidential candidates do after primaries, where you try to make the other guy go slightly too far to the side, and failed to realize the other side had changed all the rules.
He should have figuratively stood up and spit on the president and everything he did. Don't say 'I would have supported the war', and talk about 'your plans', stand there and say 'This president has made horrible choices. Here's a list of his decisions that I don't agree with. Here's evidence he engaged in a conspiracy to get us into a war.'
Maybe the next guy will do that. Although he obviously won't be running against Bush, but if Republicans don't get their act together he'll be running against his replacement.
If they do get their act together and kick out the neocons, all this is moot.
In fact, you can even argue that the founding fathers were fundamentalists. When you read stuff like 'All men endowed by their creators with certain inalienable rights', you have to ask yourself...sez who?
This just asserting that things exist with no evidence or real logic, and that therefore things must be as they say, is fundamentalism.
Luckily, 'human rights fundamentalism' is one I can get behind. Screw a debate on how much rights people 'should' have to balance societies...people just have rights, period.
Oh, I don't think they have anything against scifi personally or anything. Businesses do not set out to delibrately lose money by mismanagement. (And like I said elsewhere, if they disagree with the views in scifi, they would be a lot better of producing a series that promoted whatever they want, instead of producing series to kill.)
However, this leads to the obvious idea that somehow starting scifi series and then canceling them is profitable for them. That somehow cancelling them before they finish airing is profitable.
When you realize that most of these series are made by Fox studios, then you start to get a clearer picture. They air a series, collect fans, and then cancel it, and then sell the DVDs.
No more of this 'wait for a series to be unpopular' bullshit. By mismanaging it, they can point at ratings. They then do not have to pay to make the series anymore. (As a bonus, the horrible ratings keep other networks out.) No actors, no sets, no production costs...
...just some intellectual property that scifi fans will pay anything for, to 'show their support'. Especially when there are unaired episodes.
By being marginalized for decades, scifi fans have learned to put up with any abuse then go out and give money to the bastards who abused them.
You don't even have to postulate this is deliberate. It's just when purchasing scifi, they say 'What if it get cancelled like Wonderfalls or Firefly?' and everyone else turns at them and says 'What are you talking about? The commercials paid for the original airings, and do you know how many of those DVDs we sold?'
Spam is trival to define. It's bulk, unsolicited, email.
Bulk means 'more than a few mostly identical'.
Unsolicited means 'You do not know these people, and they have not used some sort of automated process to okay email from you'.
Email is, duh, email.
It's not rocket science. The idea that spam is subjective is a spammer lie.
Saying spam is subjective is like saying 'carbon dioxide emissions' are subjectives, because there could be trucks driving around at the factory and people walking around, all emitting CO2, so how is the government going to enforce anything.
Or: The law says people shouldn't be able to hear your radio from 100 feet away, but some people have better ears that others.
...but I don't think it's really desirable for private citizens themselves to handcuff spammers, drag them forcibly away, lock them up and have them 'accidentally fall down the stairs' until they're reduced to a bloody pulp
It really doesn't hold up now, because even if it is a string of completely amazing coincidences, someone at Fox should have noticed by now and pointed it when they were about to purchase their newest sci-fi series.
Even if they don't realize it's their fault, eventually someone should stand up and says "Wait a minute. All our scifi fails. Maybe we shouldn't purchase any more scifi."
I mean, sure mismanagement and ineptitude could explain the death of shows, but to explain the continue purchase of shows, and for them not to notice the pattern, you're basically assuming the people who purchase shows are too dumb to not drown to death in the kitchen sink.
Or possibly that the people purchasing the shows on Fox have no knowledge of what shows are currently on Fox. Maybe they think all the scifi they purchases had long and fruitful runs. (Hey! That's why Fox purchases episodes it doesn't air! So if the show purchasers hear rumors their show has been canceled, Fox can feed the episode into the TV as the 'newest episode'.)
See, you have to come up with crazier explainations if you think it's an accident.
Yes you did, sheesh. That's what "so" means in this kind of construction, especially with "deliberately". (This dictionary defines it as "in order that", in this sense.)
You're still not grasping the point. You seem to think I am saying they purchase and cancel shows to cancel shows. Which is just crazy.
They are not. They are purchasing shows so they can cancel them, and the cancelling is serving some unknown purpose. It's like purchasing a car so you can go to work. The point isn't to go to work, the point is to make money. The point isn't to cancel the shows, the point is whatever gain they are getting from that.
I'm just saying that, at the time it purchases sci-fi, it already intends to kill it for some, as yet unknown, reason.
And of course you'd don't know that and it's an incredibly stupid theory. You have evidence which isn't unreasonable to interpret as Fox deliberately "destroying" Firefly, sure; but you have no evidence they intended to do that in advance (except that they "keep" doing it).
Why is 'keep' in quotes? It's about two shows a year, over a period of a decade. I don't know how it's confusing to anyone.
What's a dozen times?
Hyperbole.
John Doe!
Tru Calling*
Futurama#
Harsh Realm!
Lone Gunmen!
Millenium!
Wonderfalls*!@
Firefly*@
Dark Angel
The Tick@
Sliders*!
Brimstone!@
Strange Luck!@
Space: Above and Beyond#
VR 5*@
Kindred: The Embraced@
Point Pleasant
MANTIS!
Roar
Brisco County, Jr.!
Freaky Links!*@
Oops, that was more than a dozen. Shows with a # got run after football, so were preempted often. Shows with a * were randomly moved around or skipped weeks for no apparent reason so no one could find them. Shows with a ! were on Friday nights in the Timeslot of Death. Shows with a @ got less than a full season. There are probably more marks I could add, but frankly I've spent enough time on this post.
But to be fair, scifi shows that were not canceled:
The X-Files!
Just one, but it was in the timeslot of death for a large amount of time.
Incidentally, it is my understanding that Fox goes through half a dozen cancelled shows a season (or thereabout) - is it really true that a disproportionate number of those are SciFi shows?
Fox cancels every single sci-fi show on it. Most before the end of the first season.
Now, Fox does cancel an amazing amount of shows, and it purchases almost all the sci-fi that's for sale, so it's possible that this is some sort of statistical anomoly. If you have all the sci-fi, and an absurd turnover, than logically you will be canceling a lot of sci-fi.
However, that doesn't explain absurd things like Fox purchasing six episodes of season 2 of Tru Calling, airing five, and then cancelling it and not showing the last one.
Or, for example, showing Firefly out of order, and not promoting it to the millions of loyal Buffy fans. Um, duh. Hell, it owns FX, where the Buffy reruns were airing twice a day. Any ads? Nope. Because there were no ads at all!
Or constantly preempting Futurama with football so no one can find the damn thing.
The last two were by the creators of two of the most largest pop-culture phenoms on TV in history, The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and they threw them away, seemingly delibrately.
The first, Tru Calling...well, okay, that had moderate ratings, and wasn't that amazing...but why the hell did they renew it, and then cancel it? What could have possibly been going through their mind there?
It's not just the cancellation, see? It's the sheer randomness of their behavior.
The ultimate reason here is Fox cannot tell good shows from crap. Thus it purchases and promotes crap, and eventually has to cancel it, and it purchases, fails to promote, and abuses quality, and has to cancel it.
I think you misunderstood. I was saying that Firefly took Buffy and removed all that.
It did add in new weirdness, like the Chinese expressions and the extremely overt western theme, but they weren't silly weirdnesses, they weren't like the things that kept people from taking Buffy seriously.
I dunno about that, but it's an interesting idea, because the other purpose of the Fox TV network is produce shows for watchers of Fox News to get riled up about.
Seriously. It's exactly those people who complain about the evils of 'Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1) who watch the damn Fox News Channel, where they call in to complain.
For some reason they're with me when I suggest a boycott, until I point out who'd they'd be boycotting...
I don't think that theory really holds up, because some of the scifi is quite unobjectional even by the most conservative standards, like John Doe. Logically, they should promoting conservative sci-fi, because the market is going to exist no matter what, and other networks will step in to fill it.
Unless they are delusional enough to think they can actually kill all sci-fi, which is just silly, as they have no control over movies or books or comics.
1) Buffy aired on the WB and UPN, but was produced by Fox. But note that, luckily, it's Fox TV that kills off sci-fi shows, quite a lot of which are produced by Fox studios, so Buffy escaped the ax. Fox studios produces great sci-fi, but sadly Fox TV has first dibs on it.
No, I didn't say anything about it wanting to do anything. Or purchasing them for the purpose of canceling them.
For all we know, it feels horrible about it and has to have a cold shower and a good cry afterwards. I'm just saying that, at the time it purchases sci-fi, it already intends to kill it for some, as yet unknown, reason.
Perhaps because Fox is worried one of them will attract the attention of our secret alien overlords, perhaps it's just to keep them out of the hands of other networks. Perhaps there's an actor someone at Fox dislikes who normally does sci-fi, so they are attempting to destroy the entire market. Perhaps Fox is secretly required by law to purchase every sci-fi show it can, and resents this, so gets around this law by canceling them.
I do not know their motives, nor do I think they are important at this point in time. I just can see the effects. Fox purchases every sci-fi show it can, and then mismanages them, so it will have an excuse to cancel them. Let's move them around randomly, let's air them opposite the Superbowl, let's show them out of order, let's put them on Friday night!
Sometimes it doesn't even bother coming up with an excuse. Sometimes it does completely absurd things like pay for episodes of shows and never air them, which is just unbelievable behavior for any sort of business, and probably grounds for a shareholder lawsuit. And they're doing it with what is traditionally the most expensive genre on TV.
I have no clue of what their motives might be. They can't seriously think that any sci-fi show they air will be successful. Even sheep get the 'Don't brush up against the electric fence' on the second or third try.
You know that expression that 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.'?
In reality, we are flipped back to front. Things on the left are still on the left, and things at the top are still at the top, it's just that the front is where the back would be if we had stepped forward through the mirror.
The reason we don't see that as front to back flipping is we can't see the back, and we have a fairly large blind spot when it comes to our back anyway. But that is a fairly obvious blind spot...we know we can't see our own ass.
So our brain is left with a choice of us being flipped left to right or up to down, neither of which is correct, and it picks left to right every time. It says 'We walked forwards and turned around, and now our left is on our right' instead of 'We walk forwards and rotated upside down, and now our up is our down', when both are equally illogical. (The most logical one being, like I said, 'We walked forward and our back and front switched sides'.)
This is demonstrated by the sheer number of people who find this example difficult to understand. On any three dimensional object, flipping it into a mirror image on any axis produces exactly the same result. Magically flip someone's head for their feet and, after they get off the floor, they will be left handed instead of right handed.
But our brain is completely ill equipped to handle things rotating upside down around a horizontal axis, because our brain is ill equipped to handle up and down at all, at least in relation to any other direction.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no way we can have a right to medical privacy, and yet drugs remain illegal.
Remember when the fight was whether or not national healthcare would cost too much? And how much welfare did cost? Remember when the budget was the important thing?
Don't we all look silly arguing about how many hundreds of millions social programs would cost, when we can apparently spend billions on a war while lowering taxes! Stupid us.
And thus it's not insanity to look to other countries to see what rights those people have when trying to define unenumerated ones. (Considering that's where our listings of rights came from in the first place.)
It's made the left compromise on so many things. And created this huge movement on the right eventually leading us to where we are now, religious control of a large part of the electorate.
One damn single issue that's simply not that important.
If it had been ignored, most states would have legalized it by now, and people living in Alabama and Mississippi would just have to go to another state.
You get rid of the nutcakes on charge of your party, and the Democrats can stop desperately throwing faces at the wall and hoping one of them sticks.
Dean is an attempt to keep the Greens and Reforms from shooting them in the leg every time they kneel down at the starting line. You'll notice he didn't get the nomination, he's just an attempt to applease the people disgusted with both parties. It's saying 'Look, the Democrats will work with you people. Please stop shooting at us.'.
And Kerry's not an idiot, he's a politician. He was playing the 'King of the Center' that presidential candidates do after primaries, where you try to make the other guy go slightly too far to the side, and failed to realize the other side had changed all the rules.
He should have figuratively stood up and spit on the president and everything he did. Don't say 'I would have supported the war', and talk about 'your plans', stand there and say 'This president has made horrible choices. Here's a list of his decisions that I don't agree with. Here's evidence he engaged in a conspiracy to get us into a war.'
Maybe the next guy will do that. Although he obviously won't be running against Bush, but if Republicans don't get their act together he'll be running against his replacement.
If they do get their act together and kick out the neocons, all this is moot.
This just asserting that things exist with no evidence or real logic, and that therefore things must be as they say, is fundamentalism.
Luckily, 'human rights fundamentalism' is one I can get behind. Screw a debate on how much rights people 'should' have to balance societies...people just have rights, period.
However, this leads to the obvious idea that somehow starting scifi series and then canceling them is profitable for them. That somehow cancelling them before they finish airing is profitable.
When you realize that most of these series are made by Fox studios, then you start to get a clearer picture. They air a series, collect fans, and then cancel it, and then sell the DVDs.
No more of this 'wait for a series to be unpopular' bullshit. By mismanaging it, they can point at ratings. They then do not have to pay to make the series anymore. (As a bonus, the horrible ratings keep other networks out.) No actors, no sets, no production costs...
By being marginalized for decades, scifi fans have learned to put up with any abuse then go out and give money to the bastards who abused them.
You don't even have to postulate this is deliberate. It's just when purchasing scifi, they say 'What if it get cancelled like Wonderfalls or Firefly?' and everyone else turns at them and says 'What are you talking about? The commercials paid for the original airings, and do you know how many of those DVDs we sold?'
You drink during golf?!?!
What's the difference between putting one brick in your yard and building a house?
But, seriously, you can't restrict unsolicited messages, period. People need to have the ability to communicate.
But you can say, if the messages is unsolicited, it has to be unique.
Go back to where you come from, New Jersians!
Spam is trival to define. It's bulk, unsolicited, email.
Bulk means 'more than a few mostly identical'.
Unsolicited means 'You do not know these people, and they have not used some sort of automated process to okay email from you'.
Email is, duh, email.
It's not rocket science. The idea that spam is subjective is a spammer lie.
Saying spam is subjective is like saying 'carbon dioxide emissions' are subjectives, because there could be trucks driving around at the factory and people walking around, all emitting CO2, so how is the government going to enforce anything.
Or: The law says people shouldn't be able to hear your radio from 100 feet away, but some people have better ears that others.
Okay, I give up. Why not?
No, they've still got the dialup that Frank Jameson's kid set up, over at the library.
Zoroastrianism all the way, baby!
Well, I didn't see it. Of course, that was probably due to them moving it around randomly. ;)
It really doesn't hold up now, because even if it is a string of completely amazing coincidences, someone at Fox should have noticed by now and pointed it when they were about to purchase their newest sci-fi series.
Even if they don't realize it's their fault, eventually someone should stand up and says "Wait a minute. All our scifi fails. Maybe we shouldn't purchase any more scifi."
I mean, sure mismanagement and ineptitude could explain the death of shows, but to explain the continue purchase of shows, and for them not to notice the pattern, you're basically assuming the people who purchase shows are too dumb to not drown to death in the kitchen sink.
Or possibly that the people purchasing the shows on Fox have no knowledge of what shows are currently on Fox. Maybe they think all the scifi they purchases had long and fruitful runs. (Hey! That's why Fox purchases episodes it doesn't air! So if the show purchasers hear rumors their show has been canceled, Fox can feed the episode into the TV as the 'newest episode'.)
See, you have to come up with crazier explainations if you think it's an accident.
are resonsible for subcontractors. It's not some sort of optional thing.
You're still not grasping the point. You seem to think I am saying they purchase and cancel shows to cancel shows. Which is just crazy.
They are not. They are purchasing shows so they can cancel them, and the cancelling is serving some unknown purpose. It's like purchasing a car so you can go to work. The point isn't to go to work, the point is to make money. The point isn't to cancel the shows, the point is whatever gain they are getting from that.
I'm just saying that, at the time it purchases sci-fi, it already intends to kill it for some, as yet unknown, reason.
And of course you'd don't know that and it's an incredibly stupid theory. You have evidence which isn't unreasonable to interpret as Fox deliberately "destroying" Firefly, sure; but you have no evidence they intended to do that in advance (except that they "keep" doing it).
Why is 'keep' in quotes? It's about two shows a year, over a period of a decade. I don't know how it's confusing to anyone.
What's a dozen times?
Hyperbole.
John Doe!
Tru Calling*
Futurama#
Harsh Realm!
Lone Gunmen!
Millenium!
Wonderfalls*!@
Firefly*@
Dark Angel
The Tick@
Sliders*!
Brimstone!@
Strange Luck!@
Space: Above and Beyond#
VR 5*@
Kindred: The Embraced@
Point Pleasant
MANTIS!
Roar
Brisco County, Jr.!
Freaky Links!*@
Oops, that was more than a dozen. Shows with a # got run after football, so were preempted often. Shows with a * were randomly moved around or skipped weeks for no apparent reason so no one could find them. Shows with a ! were on Friday nights in the Timeslot of Death. Shows with a @ got less than a full season. There are probably more marks I could add, but frankly I've spent enough time on this post.
But to be fair, scifi shows that were not canceled:
The X-Files!
Just one, but it was in the timeslot of death for a large amount of time.
Fox cancels every single sci-fi show on it. Most before the end of the first season.
Now, Fox does cancel an amazing amount of shows, and it purchases almost all the sci-fi that's for sale, so it's possible that this is some sort of statistical anomoly. If you have all the sci-fi, and an absurd turnover, than logically you will be canceling a lot of sci-fi.
However, that doesn't explain absurd things like Fox purchasing six episodes of season 2 of Tru Calling, airing five, and then cancelling it and not showing the last one.
Or, for example, showing Firefly out of order, and not promoting it to the millions of loyal Buffy fans. Um, duh. Hell, it owns FX, where the Buffy reruns were airing twice a day. Any ads? Nope. Because there were no ads at all!
Or constantly preempting Futurama with football so no one can find the damn thing.
The last two were by the creators of two of the most largest pop-culture phenoms on TV in history, The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and they threw them away, seemingly delibrately.
The first, Tru Calling...well, okay, that had moderate ratings, and wasn't that amazing...but why the hell did they renew it, and then cancel it? What could have possibly been going through their mind there?
It's not just the cancellation, see? It's the sheer randomness of their behavior.
The ultimate reason here is Fox cannot tell good shows from crap. Thus it purchases and promotes crap, and eventually has to cancel it, and it purchases, fails to promote, and abuses quality, and has to cancel it.
It did add in new weirdness, like the Chinese expressions and the extremely overt western theme, but they weren't silly weirdnesses, they weren't like the things that kept people from taking Buffy seriously.
Have you been asleep the last decade? Do you want a list of all the science fiction shows Fox has cancelled? Does anyone have a list?
Will it fit into a single post?
Seriously. It's exactly those people who complain about the evils of 'Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1) who watch the damn Fox News Channel, where they call in to complain.
For some reason they're with me when I suggest a boycott, until I point out who'd they'd be boycotting...
I don't think that theory really holds up, because some of the scifi is quite unobjectional even by the most conservative standards, like John Doe. Logically, they should promoting conservative sci-fi, because the market is going to exist no matter what, and other networks will step in to fill it.
Unless they are delusional enough to think they can actually kill all sci-fi, which is just silly, as they have no control over movies or books or comics.
1) Buffy aired on the WB and UPN, but was produced by Fox. But note that, luckily, it's Fox TV that kills off sci-fi shows, quite a lot of which are produced by Fox studios, so Buffy escaped the ax. Fox studios produces great sci-fi, but sadly Fox TV has first dibs on it.
For all we know, it feels horrible about it and has to have a cold shower and a good cry afterwards. I'm just saying that, at the time it purchases sci-fi, it already intends to kill it for some, as yet unknown, reason.
Perhaps because Fox is worried one of them will attract the attention of our secret alien overlords, perhaps it's just to keep them out of the hands of other networks. Perhaps there's an actor someone at Fox dislikes who normally does sci-fi, so they are attempting to destroy the entire market. Perhaps Fox is secretly required by law to purchase every sci-fi show it can, and resents this, so gets around this law by canceling them.
I do not know their motives, nor do I think they are important at this point in time. I just can see the effects. Fox purchases every sci-fi show it can, and then mismanages them, so it will have an excuse to cancel them. Let's move them around randomly, let's air them opposite the Superbowl, let's show them out of order, let's put them on Friday night!
Sometimes it doesn't even bother coming up with an excuse. Sometimes it does completely absurd things like pay for episodes of shows and never air them, which is just unbelievable behavior for any sort of business, and probably grounds for a shareholder lawsuit. And they're doing it with what is traditionally the most expensive genre on TV.
I have no clue of what their motives might be. They can't seriously think that any sci-fi show they air will be successful. Even sheep get the 'Don't brush up against the electric fence' on the second or third try.
You know that expression that 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.'?
What's a dozen times? Genocide?
In reality, we are flipped back to front. Things on the left are still on the left, and things at the top are still at the top, it's just that the front is where the back would be if we had stepped forward through the mirror.
The reason we don't see that as front to back flipping is we can't see the back, and we have a fairly large blind spot when it comes to our back anyway. But that is a fairly obvious blind spot...we know we can't see our own ass.
So our brain is left with a choice of us being flipped left to right or up to down, neither of which is correct, and it picks left to right every time. It says 'We walked forwards and turned around, and now our left is on our right' instead of 'We walk forwards and rotated upside down, and now our up is our down', when both are equally illogical. (The most logical one being, like I said, 'We walked forward and our back and front switched sides'.)
This is demonstrated by the sheer number of people who find this example difficult to understand. On any three dimensional object, flipping it into a mirror image on any axis produces exactly the same result. Magically flip someone's head for their feet and, after they get off the floor, they will be left handed instead of right handed.
But our brain is completely ill equipped to handle things rotating upside down around a horizontal axis, because our brain is ill equipped to handle up and down at all, at least in relation to any other direction.
Saying their actions does not make sense is one thing, but I never asserted they did make any sense.
All I said was 'Fox purchases sci-fi series so it can shoot them in the foot', which is demonstratably true.
Why Fox thinks this is a good idea is unknown at this time.