Itty53

Given the climate (pun) of politics at the time he was alive and playing that role, and given that hindsight has taught us An Inconvenient Truth was more political than it was based in science, and given that Crichton's argument was that environmentalism had to be apolitical in order to ever be effective .... yeah I'm not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

Crichton was a Democrat. And he was right, Al Gore's movie was about fear-driven politics, not actionable goals and plans.

Go look at how climate scientists described that movie. "The basic truth and it's inconvenience remains" one researcher was quoted saying. Tacitly admitting everything beyond the basic truth of the film was inaccurate. Go on, check out what retrospectives have to say about it. There's a lot of em.

Again, Crichton was right, and he was absolutely not in denial of climate change. He was against using social problems with scientific solutions as political ammunition in the fear cannons.

Bottom line is any time someone insists a complex problem has a solution as simple and clear cut as "vote Democrat", they're wrong. More wrong than they are right, especially given any timeline longer than 4 years. And that's exactly what you're doing here. "Crichton deviated from the party line on the environment ergo he's just a 'denier'". There's far more nuance in this life than that.

"American companies" smh, let me introduce you to "The City of London", not to be confused with London the city in England.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

The UK has a metropolitan region called "The City" (of London) where banks get to basically play without rules. It is for that reason the financial capital of the entire world.

The UK has a square mile dedicated to white collar crime and fraud and it exists because the international wealthy were more powerful than the monarchy ever could be, let's not pretend Americans are the ones who gave up. This is a very long, very old battle - older than America the nation itself.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.

Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.

But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc -- he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.

Prigozhin doesn't give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.

I think it's extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn't a politician and he's just a thug, but I also think it's equally unlikely Putin's Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin's pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social "downgrade" of Russia's status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.

We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It's no longer a question of "rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes", now its "russian nukes don't exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties". That's scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around in the middle of it with the biggest dick on the block. He'd predictably go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.

"We were going to release you!"

One of the rare movies that starts shaky and then finds its footing and breaks out into a conditioned run by the end of it. Didn't go in expecting much, got a good time.

Rest ye Jarnathan, you deserve a break.

Edit, and the dragon! My wife is obsessed with dragons and she was in love with the one in the movie, it's like her favorite dragon now.

I just can't fathom buying a luxury car and coping with "well it works and gets me where I need to go". If I'm spending that kinda change on a car, and also paying for its services in ongoing fashion apart from the car payment itself ... it better do more than just "get me there".

That dude 100% deserved it. Not for anything he said but for being a tech career guy and wiring his house up so hard he couldn't open it without Alexa. He wouldn't have been able to open it without wifi either.

"Fairly decent" is a bit of a stretch. Panels come up, features sold to you that won't work and will endanger your life. "Fairly" standard for luxury rides amiright?

"Decent". Hmph.

No he didn't. The context was "as a US citizen" per the post. You gave him a 6th grade civics lesson about how bills turn into laws a-la school house rock before even sort of addressing the question. The next step would've been explaining what laws even are.

That's a little condescending, assuming a citizen of a nation doesn't know how their own laws are created. It isn't a LOT condescending but it is a little.

On reddit you'll see reply counts reflecting replies of any user, including shadowbanned ones. You won't see shadowbanned comments though. That's why you see 3 count but not the comments. Chances are those comments are from bots who were shadowbanned.

It used to be. It isn't. He was pointing out that it's irrelevant today, and he's not wrong.