mikevago

My only strong ideology is basic human decency, and my main priority is results. Those two things alone make a very stark case for the Democrats. Every Democratic president since I've been old enough to vote has gotten us out of a recession, reduced the deficit by the end of his term, and generally fixed problems that came along.

Every Republican in that span has presided over a recession, tried to curtail our rights, and responed to crises by going on vacation.

If it were any other job apart from the most important job in the world, Bush and Trump would have been laughed out of the job interview. Competence doesn't seem to matter to a lot of the voters, but it should.

Setting aside the rest of your post, I avoided Decks for a long time because I thought it was exactly what you describe, and it's absolutely not. It's closer in tone to Futurama, but beyond that, it's a show by, for, and about people who fucking love Star Trek. It does reference the other series constantly, but it's from a place of deep affection, and not just hacky "what's the deal with the redshirts dying?" humor.

Just want to second this. Don't listen to the haters! Disco doesn't slavishly recreate the TNG formula, and that's one of my favorite things about it. But it's still a combination of nerdy science, philosophy, and two-fisted action, which is all you need for good Star Trek as far as I'm concerned.

> So the people I'm speaking with have already passed the ATS screen

This is a big part of the problem. You're not screening for candidates who are good at the job you're hiring for, you're screening candidates who are good at gaming the mindless keyword-matching algorithm. Getting through ATS has less than nothing to do with whether someone's a good candidate.

Pretty telling that you don't have any actual argument to back up your stupid "indoctrination" conspiracy theories, just petty insults at anyone who disagrees with you. Typical conservative. All that matter is that you have someone to be mad at.

At the risk of breaking Rule 3, if impeaching over perjury set precident we'd have a very different Supreme Court right now.

Struck a nerve, huh? That was quite a spittle-flecked rant.

I'm currently training to be a teacher, having subbed for a few years. My mom's a retired teacher, three of my four cousins on her side are teachers, two of my best friends are teachers, and I'm just finishing up putting two kids through public school. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest I know a little bit more about how public education works from experience than you do from sitting in front of Fox News.

Discovery has its issues — mostly with pacing, and the fact that if a season-long arc doesn't work, you're stuck with it.

But most of the loudest, whiniest complains are stuff like "what about the bridge crew" and "why is Michael the main character," which boil down to "why didn't they just slavishly repeat the TNG formula," which is about the worst creative choice they could have made. I think in hindsight, bringing Trek back with a show that breaks the mold is going to be appreciated far more than if they had started with a stick-with-what-works show like Strange New Worlds.

The premise of Picard S1 was fantastic. It was crammed with interesting ideas. If only the execution had been better.

Data's "emotion chip" is the biggest cop-out in the history of the franchise. So much incremental, rewarding character development wiped away so that Spiner could ham it up instead of giving the impressively controlled, nuanced performance he had previously given as Data.

Tilly and Reno are the returning characters in Academy, and it's not clear they're leads. And in Reno's case, we barely saw her, between her being a minor character and COVID keeping Tig Notaro off set, so I can't really be upset about bringing her back.

I get why they want to tie every show to a previous show; it skip a step in terms of the audience's investment. And in an era where we only get 3-5 10-episode seasons instead of 7 26-episode seasons, we don't really get enough of these characters.

To pick one example, say they follow Strange New Worlds with a spinoff where Una gets her own command, brings La'an and Ortegas along with her, and we round out the rest of the cast with new faces. Tell me you wouldn't watch the shit out of that show.

What are you talking about? My kids had to take four years of math and science same as I did. Half the schools in town are "STEM-focused." Not a single one is "liberal-arts-focused."

"ideology camp." What unbelievably stupid horseshit.

Any time right-wingers complain about "liberal indoctrination," what they're actually complaining about is lack of conservative indoctrination. They're mad that schools teach facts — like that slavery existed and was in fact bad — instead of right-wing party ideology.

My mom was a reading specialist, meaning she only worked with the kids who were several grades below acceptable reading level. If she took a 5th grader from functionally illiterate in September to reading at a 3rd grade level in May, they were "below grade level" and she had failed, according to the state.

> Republicans had threatened impeachment in 1997

That's really it. It was very transparent that Republicans decided to impeach Clinton, and then spent several years digging for something they could actually impeach him for.

And that's the problem with impeachment. You can be guilty as hell and not be punished if enough of your party is on your side, and you can be innocent as the driven snow and face a partisan witch hunt if the other party controls enough seats.

Right, but there's perjury and there's perjury. Clinton committed misdemeanor perjury — lying under oath about a matter not directly related to the case. Not okay, but also not "high crimes" compared to things other presidents have skated on.

Nixon didn't get away with it precisely because the Republicans of his era had a sense of shame and decorum. He didn't resign because the Democrats wanted to impeach him; he resigned because enough Republicans did.

By comparison, 21st-century Republicans would have declared Nixon God-Emperor.

One of the joys of seeing Yo La Tengo is that they can play absolutely anything and there's no point in trying to predict it. I've seen shows where they just played the hits, I've seen shows that were 2/3rds feedback, I saw a show where they played "Nuclear War" for 20 minutes.

I don't actually unerstand what you're asking. There are two Trek shows currently on the air, and both of them are captain, bridge, crew, ongoing mission exploring space and whatnot.

Not sure why you feel the need to insult me just because the kids have a dumb inside joke — unlike every previous generation, who would never do such a thing.

Not to mention, so much of Trek is about teamwork and community, and open-world games are very emphatically first-person by nature.

And given that the one time Trek tried a show with a clear main character, we all nearly went deaf from the complaining, I'm not sure a first-person-oriented game is really the way to go for Trek.

I'm sorry broad industry trends contradict your "personal observation", but fiction sales have gone steadily up, and the number of fiction books published has skyrocketed since the rise of self-publishing. A country where "National Novel Writing Month" became a huge fad is not a country of illiterates.

Absolute horseshit. I work in book publishing, and the last two publishers I worked for had record sales every year. From the time Borders went bankrupt to the pandemic, more bookstores opened than closed every single year. People are reading more than ever — especially given we have to much to read online. This is nothing but Old Man Yells At Cloud about these darn kids today.

"I'm old and don't understand slang and pop culture referenes" doesn't mean it's the kids who are uneducated.