• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Is it just Gen Z?

    Most movie sex scenes are terrible. They fail as both pornography and as literary devices.

    When you put a sex scene, or any other scene in a movie it has to serve some purpose. It can move the plot along, it can show the characters emotions or it can just be there for titillation. If it’s just there because someone thinks that the main characters are supposed to smash, it’s dumb.

    I remember that when we rented “Basic Instinct” you knew how often people re-watched the interrogation scene because the old VHS tapes would get worn at that spot and you could see the screen artifacts.

    Two things made that worth watching. The whole movie was about sex so it made sense, both in the movie and for the character. The way to get porn at the time was to walk into a store and buy a magazine. And Sharon Stone was hot, OK 3 reasons.

    There absolutely are movies where the sex scenes make sense and are important. David Kronenberg’s “Crash” and Kimberly Peirce’s “Boys Don’t Cry”, would have been weird if they didn’t include the sex scenes or just left them implied.
    The sex scene in, “Team America: World Police”, worked because it was a satire of sex scenes in movies.
    Pornhub works because their scenes are very explicit.

    When you have a boring, unironic, semi-artistic sex scene in a movie that’s not otherwise about sex, it’s just a distraction.










  • The reports I’ve read claim that around 1,000 Hamas terrorist entered Israel. The IDF claims to have recovered the bodies of about 1,500 terrorists inside Israel. Given that this is an active conflict, it’s not surprising that the numbers don’t line up but they’re of the same order of magnitude.

    Since Hamas has hostages it’s clear that at least some of those terrorists made it back to Gaza. It’s also clear that the IDF has, by now, killed the vast majority of the terrorists who carried out these acts.

    So who is currently being targeted by IDF ordinance?



  • Thanks. It’s an interesting article but I don’t think it addresses the core of the problem. Who eats the rats when the dirty snake is gone?

    The article covers a lot of reasons for Democrats to dislike McCarthy. That’s kind of a given though since he’s the leader of the opposition party during a time of heightened partisan rivalry. It doesn’t address the question of if it’s actually a good idea.

    The hope that Democrats will be able to force Republicans to elect a more moderate speaker seems like a moon shot. Democrats don’t have a majority and McCarthy barely managed to get past the objections of the hardliners. What chance does a more moderate speaker have?

    Barring that unlikely scenario, the result is going to be an even more divided house. We don’t even know when a new speaker can be elected. The hardliners have shown that they can shut down someone who shows even a hint of compromise. If their power to obstruct just grew since the Patrick McHenry doesn’t have the power to actually pass laws. Those hardliners now have a credible chance at carrying out their threat to “Shut it all down.”



  • What was the lie on Sunday? When I searched for “mccarthy lie sunday” I get a bunch of stuff about Gaetz but nothing about what the lie was.

    My jaw hit the floor when I saw this news though. As near as I can tell McCarthy took a huge political risk in giving the finger to the hardliners and working with the Democrats to get the budget through.

    As it stands I expect 3 consequences:

    1. Republicans will double down on never working with Democrats.
    2. The hardliners will gain significant power within the Republican party
    3. The Republicans are going to replace him with someone much more hard line

    Every Republican will look at today’s events and decide that it’s political suicide to work with the Democrats. They’ve just seen that doing so will draw the ire of hardliners and gain no benefit from Democrats and even the leader of the party can get booted for doing so. Very few people will want to risk their careers on reaching across the isle.

    Gaetz challenged McCarthy. McCarthy said, “Bring it on.” Gaetz brought it and won. So now Gaetz is going to run a few victory laps and every interaction he has with his party will carry an implicit, “Don’t fsck with me unless you want to get McCarthied.”

    Given that Gaetz went after him specifically for working with the Democrats I expect that the Republicans will look for someone who is far less inclined to collaborate.



  • I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.

    The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.



  • They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.