Back when the Queen was still alive, Stephen Fry described her role as being “as if Uncle Sam was a real person.” Meaning, being a sort of personification of the country without actually holding any real power over it. I’m not a huge fan of the British monarchy, but if we have to have one I’m at least glad it’s limited to being essentially a powerless tourist attraction.
Case in point: Dick Cheney. And Henry Kissenger.
Thus opening the door for some sort of Clinton-Bush type of future scenario where a Democrat and Republican are buddies behind the scenes and just keep running for one term and alternating for 20-odd years.
It sucks that we all have to live through it, but I feel like the current times in the US are a really interesting test of the sort of limits of democracy. By that I mean, what happens if the majority of the population just willingly elects the worst person they can find, and at the same time every check, balance, rule and tradition that everyone assumed would keep things on the rails just… turn out to be kind of bullshit because nobody is willing to enforce them?
It raises all sorts of weird questions, like at a certain point is it okay to overrule democracy in some way to protect the country and the people, even if the majority seem to want to just run the bus off a cliff? And what about the people who didn’t vote for this? Are they expected to just go down with ship or have to leave their home country altogether? An informed and engaged populace is vital to a healthy democracy, but what if enough people are uninformed/propagandized enough that they just willing take down the whole country? Does the rest of the world just let it implode?
I have no real answers to these questions, but I’d love to be studying this whole situation from like 100 years after it’s all over.
“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
Also even “Today” is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:
After the release and minor success of the band’s debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as “the next Nirvana”. However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer’s block. Corgan recalled that “after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months.”
…
The dark, ironic lyrics of “Today”, describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is “downright pretty as rock ballads go” but that “Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks.” Corgan told Rolling Stone that “I was really suicidal … I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can’t get any worse.” Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of “Today” and “Disarm” to “ripping [his] guts out”.
I remember an old interview with RTD from his first run where he said that by now the Doctor has become part of the national folklore like Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes so it’ll never truly go away which I think is true. Even if the TV show goes away again for a while, Big Finish will keep going, people will keep writing books, there’ll be fan fiction etc.
And presumably it’ll have to enter the Public Domain eventually too, although that’s probably still a long way off.
Yeah that’s honestly the main thing for me too. It’s $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like… $30, especially since by all accounts it’s not even finished.
It was a pretty interesting interview I thought. The part where RTD talked about the importance of being able to be decisive in the moment as a showrunner regardless of whether or the decision turns out to be good or not was quite telling lol.
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I suppose it’s just like most drug addicts, you don’t really choose what you get addicted to or when, something just sort of gets its hooks into you at some point and that’s it.
Plus if you factor in having essentially no boundaries on your life (ie infinite money and nobody to tell you no or stop you doing anything, being more-or-less above the law, access to high-quality drugs and world-class healthcare) you can probably go on doing stuff like that pretty much indefinitely. IIRC that’s how Keith Richards said he was able to go on doing drugs for so long - he was loaded so he could always get the good stuff that wasn’t mixed with anything.
Yeah I mean, water and oxygen can both kill you in high enough amounts.
Thinking about it, whoever Elon’s dealer is probably has a pretty sweet gig as far as drug dealing goes. They’ve got someone on the hook who is the magical combination of being an addict, has infinite wealth, doesn’t know the value of anything, and is a huge asshole so they probably don’t even feel bad about exploiting them lol.
I’m not American. but it always seems to me like the Democrats immediately tie themselves in knots trying to meet the Republicans halfway, when everyone knows they have no intention of budging an inch.
It’s like if two people share a meal, one person goes “Should we split this bill 50/50” and the other one just says “No fuck you, you pay 100%.” Then the first person, instead of telling them to fuck off, says “Okay I’ll pay 75%, how’s that?” and the other one just refuses until they eventually pay about 5%, then complain about it for the next year and tell they first person that they still owe them for the 5% they paid.
Then the first person invites them for dinner again.
It’s like a regular nuclear reactor, except it’s run by people who don’t know anything about nuclear reactors, the waste is dumped wherever without consequence, and the power output is only used to run an AI and mine cryptos.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking too. A village would involve someone helping this woman in some way, not just making her do everything and then taking a picture of it for (presumably) social media clout.
He also has done a bunch of conventions and returned to play the Doctor for Big Finish multiple times lol.
As far as I can tell he has no problem with the role or the fans, he just has a beef with the BBC/Russell T. Davies over how he was treated.
Dexter managed to utterly fuck it’s ending up, come back, redeem itself, then utterly fuck the ending again. And now it’s getting both a prequel and another sequel series, the former of which seems to be getting good reviews so far.
I want to see if it can pull off the “fuck it up, redeem, fuck it up” trick for four consecutive shows in a row. I believe it can.
For what it’s worth, RTD was also saying the same thing 20-odd years ago when he was on about season 2-3 of his first run lol.