unixknight

He was in Kazaam.

Don't forget Shaq in "Steel" or Will Smith in "Hancock." (Not that I blame you for not thinking of Steel.)

I don't have a problem with wealthy people at all. Bill Gates made his fortune on his own brains and work, so more power to him. I don't even have a problem with people like Paris Hilton who inherited their money. Remember that my remarks were within the context of materialism being a replacement for spirituality.

I didn't say that at all. I'm pointing out the flaw in Marxism, because it DOES assume that. What I'm saying is that there's nothing unfair about one person having more money than someone else, because the true measure of the quality of life is not counted in dollars. (Or rubles!)

No I understood what you meant. I just wanted to express that thought.

And you know, that's a terrible place to be stuck in. When people go to see his movies they expect a surprise twist, which means if it isn't there, then the audience will be dissatisfied whether the rest of the movie was good or not. Not only that, but it's not like you can tack on a surprise twist for every story. That limits the types of films he can even attempt to make. The Sixth Sense really boxed him in. It's a weird case where he's been a victim of his own early success.

Well, this weekend was a complete failcluster. At a staff meeting at work on Friday, they ordered pizza. I limited my intake, but still felt gross. Then on Friday night I got home from work to discover that... we were having pizza. Again, I limited what I ate but there was a soda in there. Saturday I did ok... a couple small sausage patties and eggs for breakfast, a home cooked turkey burger for lunch and tuna casserole for dinner. I nursed a 20oz Pepsi all day (didn't finish it.) Then... there was the Burger King bacon cheeseburger combo. The only positive thing I can say about it is that the soda was a small. Yesterday I did the same breakfast as Saturday but with the addition of a small bunch of grapes and some toast. Lunch was a tuna sammich and some popcorn. Dinner was a turkey/bacon/cheese sammich with has browns and... a soda. So... back to a zero soda approach. I expect my weight will have gone up on my Wednesday weigh-in. *sigh*

Ok. Now that I've had more time to digest that movie I have decided now that I didn't like it. And it isn't for the reasons I mentioned in the OP. Oh, and more spoilers. I can sum up my dislike with one word: Leia. When Han Solo and Leia Organa fell in love in The Empire Strikes Back, it felt like a great love story. It felt authentic, it was believable, and it was perfectly executed. It felt like Leia had brought out the romantic, softer side of the rogue smuggler and that made her, and them as a couple, special. But it wasn't, was it? Han had been in love before. He'd been in love so deeply that he was trying to get ahold of a ship so that he could return to Corellia to reunite with her, even after a 3 year tour of duty in the Imperial military, becoming a deserter and a criminal, and having had precisely -zero- communication from her in the meantime. And when they do reunite? The flames came right back up and the only thing that took her out of the picture what that she turned out to have become evil and was working for Darth Maul. 🙄 Then she ditched him. So now the whole Leia relationship feels weird. (Mind you, Disney's been smashing that to pieces already since Episode 7, bit I digress) Does Han still think about Qi'ra when he's smooching Leia? I mean, I always assumed that he'd kissed other women before but that none of them were special like Leia was. Did he ever tell Leia about Qi'ra? I dunno maybe I'm making too much of this, but he uniqueness of the Han/Leia romance in Star Wars just feels diluted now.

A person doesn't have to be thin skinned to find it inappropriate to use words like "idiot" to describe people who decide differently from you on a particular issue. And it's not a weak analogy to make the point I was making, which is different from the one you're making now. Earlier, you called it child abuse to not vaccinate, I pointed out other examples of parental decisions that other may also question as child abuse. Calling it child abuse is hyperbole and overstating the case. As I said, parents who make that choice honestly believe that they're acting in their child's best interest. That is not child abuse. Period. I wish more parents thought that much about their child's well being. Sure, they're making the wrong decision, but I'd take a set of parents who don't vaccinate over parents who neglect their kids or teach them immorality any day. As for the argument that it endangers the community... Well, they just don't see it that way. And if we're being honest, the threat isn't that grave. The Measles outbreak in that Jewish community in New York is only a danger to the other kids within that community who aren't vaccinated. It's not a significant threat to the public at large.

So before I get into the meat of the post, with your kind indulgence I'd like to give the background for this subject. I've been learning Russian as a hobby for some time now. Being bilingual is fun, being trilingual is better. Pursuant to this goal, I started watching the series "Trotsky" on Netflix. It's a historical drama, made in Russia, featuring Leon Trotsky, one of the original revolutionaries that brought about the Communist takeover in Russia during WWI. It's subtitled but I try not to read them unless I have to. Anyway, there's a scene in which a young-ish Leon Trotsky is in Paris in 1904 and has been invited to a soiree by a woman he's interested in. She describes the event as a sort of dinner party. In reality, it was much more hedonistic, with people drinking, laughing, carrying on, doing drugs, etc. Trotsky is disgusted by this, and gives a sort of monologue before leaving the party. The speech was... well it was pretty darn convincing. It made me see what the Communist revolutionaries saw. He criticized the posh, hedonistic lifestyle of wealthy Parisians, living off of the labor of the working class whom they were stealing from. He sneered at these partygoers for believing themselves to be superior to the people of the working class who were the ones making it possible for this kind of lifestyle to exist. I admit, for a few minutes I was taken aback, and it led me to wonder... Had I been in that room, would Trotsky's words have convinced me? Would I have joined the October Revolution several years later? So I began to ponder, and ask myself some tough questions about what I believe, why I believe it, and whether it was actually right. This is the conclusion I came to: Were men like Trotsky, Lenin and Marx right? No. No they weren't. They were absolutely, catastrophically wrong. They were wrong because even though their words were all about fairness, equality, justice and morality, what they were really obsessing over is money. The proletariat were the victims because, simply, they had less money than the rich. As if happiness, joy and fulfilment were tied to the size of one's bank account. Trotsky believed that it was wrong that he could be at a party where some young man could show up, eat, drink, dance, do some drugs and maybe take a woman home with him, and that was why he was happier than the steelworker who made the steel girders holding up the walls of the venue. But is he? I mean, going to a party and doing all that sounds like fun and all... But who is the happier man? The guy who spends his time living an admittedly luxurious and carefree life, or the man who works an honest day's labor and comes home to a warm, loving family? I come home every day to my wife and 3 of my kids, in my house. I'm happy. Would I trade places with someone who lives like Paris Hilton? Absolutely not. Would I trade places with Bill Gates, who also has a wife and kids and a zillion dollars? No. To the best of my knowledge Gates is not a man of religion. For many such people, the pursuit of wealth and possession is the biggest difference between them and the ordinary guy. It's the thing that fills in the void. The number of dollars in my bank account is insignificant next to his, and yet I feel more successful in my life because I have something deeper, more valuable, more fulfilling than yachts and vacation houses. Sure, I'd love to be so financially secure that I didn't have to worry about holding down a job, but that's a selfish fantasy. A person who doesn't work (whether taking care of the home/family or at a job outside the home) isn't contributing to the good of the community, and that's not a goal to aspire to. (Obviously that doesn't apply to children and retired people.) I wouldn't want to live like one of those Parisian partygoers, simply because they lived empty, meaningless lives. It's about spirituality. Why would I trade the security of knowing my place in eternity for a few more zeroes behind the balance on my bank statement? And yet this is what guys like Trotsky obsessed over. (Or at least, it's what their rhetoric convinced people to obsess over.) They spoke of revolution and equality and the rise of the common man but it all boiled down to class envy and the façade of fairness. The Communist Revolution was based on a philosophy of utter materialism wrapped in a veneer of social justice. It wasn't honorable. It wasn't noble, and it wasn't right. Of course it comes as no surprise that the leaders of the October Revolution went on to be ruthless men of power and wealth. What other kind of people would a purely materialist philosophy attract? Why would you expect them to be anything but what they were? Duh! The opposite of materialism is spirituality, in whatever form that takes. It's little wonder the Soviet Union became completely hostile to religion when religion is the antithesis of materialism.

No I can see where @SpiritDragon is coming from. It isn't your message, it's the tone of the way it came across. Parents who don't vaccinate their kids honestly believe they're making decisions in the best interests of the child they love. That isn't child abuse, any more than it's abuse to let your kid eat sugary cereal for breakfast or ride in an airplane... both are activities that are seen by some as being incredibly dangerous or unhealthy. Not child abuse, even if some disagree. They're not idiots, just misinformed. For whatever, reason, such people trust the source that told them vaccines cause autism or whatever. The problem that needs solving isn't abusive parents, it's education.

If all those people were in the same place, yeah. They aren't though. Herd immunity is a useful thing.

The answer to your question is in the thread. I'd recommend reading it before playing the "I'm too smart to consider anyone else's point of view" card.

No, I don't really think it challenges anything. The animal kingdom has plenty of examples of life that doesn't coincide with human biology. Male seahorses carry their young. Octopodes keep their brains (and genitals, in the case of males) in their tentacles. Some frogs can change sex in response to imbalances in the population. Some birds feed their young by regurgitating. What's natural and normal for one species on this planet isn't necessarily natural for another. So as to the question of whether that quote applies to all living things, my guess would be that it does not, in the case of animals for whom switching sex is natural. The sex of a kobudai isn't an essential characteristic of its identity, apparently.

I think that's basically it. They wanted to appeal to the older fans and have Luke, Han and Leia there to pass the torch. "This is legitimate, real Star Wars! We swear!" (In Star Trek, this is exactly why they brought in Leonard Nimoy for the Abramsverse films.)

Yeah... that's where it starts to really go into the reeds with conspiracy theory. I have lots of issues with the administrative side of our healthcare system, but the technology, procedures and care itself is top notch. Not perfect, but way better than it gets credit for.

You're killing me, man.

I'm getting to the point where I tune out the sycophants. Every President has them but these last two seem to be more than usual. I think it's partly to do with changes in culture and campaigning where the rockstar approach is more effective than the traditional approaches. Elect someone to be a rockstar, people will react to them like a rockstar. With the Obama fans it was a "scandal free presidency" start to finish and were calling for a Constitutional amendment to remove term limits the day after he was elected. With the Trumplings it's everything Trump does is part of the 4D underwater chess master plan. Both Presidents made mistakes. Both Presidents did good things. Anyone who is willfully blind to any of that is someone whose political acumen is unreliable at best.

I don't know any, but I suspect that they do more often than you'd think. Realtalk: I agree that it's incredibly foolish in 2019 to still believe the fake studies linking autism to vaccines. The evidence debunking that is everywhere and easy to find. We all here seem to agree on that. That said... if, for whatever reason, a person finds that stuff compelling enough to avoid vaccinating their kids, they honestly believe they're acting in their child's best interests. That's still better parenting than a lot of cases out there. Are they wrong? Yes. Are they doing their best, as they see it? Yeah. I believe they are. And that usually means they know the risks and are doing what they can to mitigate them. I'm not defending people who refuse to vaccinate. I'm just trying to keep the focus where it belongs: On a lack of education.

You make good points. I guess I just can't imagine he was thinking of the kids when he wrote all the political drama and exposition. Then I also think about moments like the one during the pod race where the one little alien dies in a fireball after we were shown that his wife and kids were there watching the race. If this is what Lucas sees as kids' movies... That raises questions in my mind... I agree that there was a TON of content for kids... like Jar-Jar, little kid Anakin, etc... but that feels like marketing. Remember when Episode I came out? Licensed merch was absolutely EVERYWHERE.

I dunno if it's much of a comfort or not, but taking issue with the religious affiliation of public officials isn't really new. JFK took a beating for being Catholic, when his political opponents questioned whether his primary loyalty was to Washington or to Rome.

We could also create a Google Docs repo...

I don't think you'd need to change owners, just grant access to others. if we all work on the same sheet, then not everyone needs to have Excel locally.

I'd be more t han happy to set up the sheet and then hand it over to @zil to host!

I think many in the LGBT movement are religious bigots, though I'm not sure this is an example. Mind you, I think the school is perfectly well within its rights to have whatever restrictions it wants, but looking at it from their point of view, they see it as discrimination against them. So their reaction isn't really bigoted per se. That said, you don't have to go far to see that that this is only making the news because it's about Mrs. Pence, and if she worked at a private Islamic school nobody on the left would have said beans.