Bill Carmichael

re: hockey, Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest boxers ever to live, gave up three years in the prime of his life — years in which his fighting would have been at peak; actual money incalculable — rather than fight in an unjust war, so noping out on grandpa’s burger bash should be an easy choice

My feeling is that Democrats should just not attend the State of the Union.

YouTube video by Steve Shives Star Trek: TNG But It Was Released in 2026

youtu.be/y0hnpCno-rQ?...

The UK arrested Prince Andrew. Hakeem Jeffries is telling Democrats not to boo Trump at the State of the Union.

Not...great? The hell are you talking about?

This is a great thread. There are a lot of people out there complaining about supposedly bad writing who simply aren't engaging the fiction on its own terms. Failure of imagination in a fandom that throws the word "visionary" around like confetti.

This is maybe the most condescending instance I've ever seen of mistaking one's own taste as a sign of personal superiority.

A bunch of cowardly bootlickers.

That stuff is baked into the culture. We're swimming in it. And we can't hope to fix it if our first instinct is to deny our part in it. So you didn't vote for it; you still are not free of it. Not free of it's effects, nor of the responsibility to fix it.

I didn't vote for any of this either, but acting as though any American is free of the racist legacy that enabled it, the xenophobia, the avarice, the misogyny, the homophobia, the sheer unwillingness to look beyond our own short term interests? (1/2)

Every American needs to watch this:

They aren't; they're knowingly using a headline that they know will make people angry, so that people repost it, and drive traffic to their site. It's their entire mode of operation and we all keep falling for it.

That's why I said there's no arguing with taste: I'm not saying you have to like it. I'm saying that if the "Henson feel" is something so abstract that very very similar pieces of work by him and by somebody else are registering differently to you, it can't have anything to do with Henson.

Gotcha. Well, there's no arguing with taste, of course, but suggesting that it was somehow out of keeping with Henson's comic sensibilities is just straight up incorrect.

The Bluesky experience: go searching for people talking about the new Muppet show. Results are cluttered with random political posts, mainly from Britain, where people are using "Muppet" as a term of abuse for conservatives and fascists. Which is giving them more honor than they deserve!

Didn't feel right because of Sabrina Carpenter? Or the "beating up" part? Because...Rita Moreno from the original?

"Giant Freakin Robot" is pure trolling clickbait, yes? Nobody is actually that stupid.

I'm pretty sure there are no giant multinational media conglomerates that are ethically sound, I'll agree with that much.

That's an ABC show as well.

Without wanting to pry... Are you sure? As far as I know, it was only broadcast on ABC affiliates. It would be wildly out of character for Disney to allow a competitor to broadcast something like this.

Neither do I, but that's not the point. You said:

"I couldn't even watch the stinking Muppets last night because they were on CBS"

Disney owns ABC. Paramount owns CBS.

The new Muppets thing is on Disney, not CBS.

THIS Democrat wants ICE disbanded and prosecuted. Maybe you should step down in favor of someone who will actually fight.

So your entire argument is predicted not just on ignorance, but on a stubborn determination to*remain* ignorant, and yet you still want to participate in the Discourse. How do you feel about the people who talk shit about sports fans without ever watching sports themselves?

Now I only hear it from people who want to congratulate themselves on having sophisticated taste because they only like the kids stuff from when they were kids themselves, and want to pretend the difference is something else. As I said before, miss me with that nonsense.

I'm 57 years old and I've been watching and reading stuff that people mistakenly believed was only for kids my entire life. Once superheroes took over the cinema, that kind of talk died down. (1/2)

Barstool out here demonstrating what I'm talking about. The "standards" set by the older shows would allow for every third episode to be a goofy misfire and for shows to spend a full season of 26 episodes figuring out how the storytelling is going to work. "The standards". Fuck outta here.

Some of the complaints about "Starfleet Academy" make me think that people are looking back at the older shows with some very rose colored lenses. In particular, critiques of the writing appear to be glossing over how simplistic TOS was, and that it took a year and a half for TNG to stop sucking.

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

youtu.be/wWKSoxG1K7w?...

Is the other site Twitter? Who's over there besides Nazi and dupes of Nazis?