And Paula Abdul did the choreography for the dancing girls!

Or if you’re in for a trashy good time, The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger!

Trump Admin: Cap interest rates at 10%, but also we repeal the thirteenth amendment.

Democrats: No! What is wrong with you?!

Republicans: DEMONRATS WON’T WORK WITH US TO CAP INTEREST RATES AND ALSO THEY DRINK SMOOTHIES MADE OF BABIES!

Republican Voting Base: [Thunderous applause. 90% voter turnout. 99% voter loyalty.]

Everyone Else: I dunno, both parties seem the same. [Sub-50% voter turnout. Interfactional backstabbing intensifies.]

Without becoming the worst version of what they hope to defeat, they at least have to acknowledge that the game has changed. Democrats are still trying to make three-point baskets while not doing much more than tut tutting about the fact that Republicans have set up a step ladder and are dumping bags of tennis balls through the hoop on the other side of court.

If there’s one thing I’d hope that Democrats would learn from Trump’s successes, it’s that playing the part of the staid, respectable, traditional politician is not a winning strategy. I don’t think it’s reasonable to suppose that adopting better policies will, in and of itself win elections; Trump has either terrible policies or none whatsoever, and voters still eat him up. He’s a carnival clown, and that’s what the majority wants.

Get out there and start screaming. Throw tantrums. Take credit for things (preferably good things that you did, but again, Trump proves that all you really need to do is take credit, period, and let reality try and catch up with you). Democracy is a shared hallucination, and Trump has proven that if you employ sufficient pressure, you can change the nature of the dream, policies and reality be damned. If Democrats don’t accept that public perception is reality and adjust their strategies accordingly, they and we are going to continue to get fucked for the foreseeable future.

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don’t think that’s how a real sword fight would look.

Akira fucking Kurosawa, on the other hand…

The Protagonist Throw!

Notably, the Terminator never lays a finger on Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, because Cameron knew that if the perfect killing machine got its hands on its target, it would just kill her immediately and that would be the end of the movie.

Or tossing an entire Zippo lighter into a pool of gasoline. Do you have any idea how much a good Zippo costs?!

In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.

I think in Event Horizon they tell the guy about to get airlocked to take deep breaths and then let all the air out of his lungs… which I think is accurate if you want to live as long as possible in vacuum. But then he gets horribly disfigured by the decompression, so they might have only got some points for accuracy.

There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.

If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.

Hell, in Star Trek VI, where the Praxis Effect originates, it’s a horrifying industrial accident that blows up Praxis, so for all we know there might well have been some kind of moon-sized particle accelerator that blew up and did cause that ring shape. But it seems to show up in a lot of places where there’s not as justifiable an excuse.

I was in a play once where we were going to fire a blank onstage, in a fairly small black box theatre. There were two options, a .22 and a .45 caliber blank. The .22 made a sharp CRACK that really shocked you. The .45 made a VWOOM sound that filled up the entire room and left you with the feeling of a wave of violent energy having just passed through your entire body.

We went with the .22.

Ahem

Better for what? I only listen to mp3s I’ve got stored on my phone; I use BlackPlayer for that, and I love it. For streaming music purposes… I dunno, I never got into that racket.

Precisely so.

I shit you not, I once watched a lady talking to the information desk at an art museum about a membership with a toddler. The kid started getting antsy, and didn’t listen after she told them to stop trying to run away. She had the kid lay down on their stomach, and she very gently put her foot on the kid’s back, so she was in effect halfway standing on them. The kid didn’t even seem upset, just “This is what happens when I don’t listen.” Awe inspiring.

Yeah, not getting what they want might mess up a kid’s afternoon. Being taught that throwing tantrums can get them what they want might mess a kid up for their entire life.

Nothing should! Parenting is hard fucking work, and if you’re not one hundred percent up for it, then don’t do it!

Even in some fantasy ideal world where pregnancy and childbirth are easy, preschool is free, and the future isn’t somewhere between bleak and horrifying… being a parent is still an incredibly taxing ordeal, mentally, physically, and emotionally. There are plenty of kids in the world. Nobody should get born to parents that feel even the slightest bit of reluctance at their existence.

The theory I heard on the Strict Scrutiny podcast is that the 5th Circuit exists to write atrocious opinions on terrible rulings so that the Supreme Court can make rulings that are only 85% as horrible as that so the SC can seem more reasonable by comparison.