A few points:

1. Good strong imposition of the rules at the start, Teague. I started a Trump thread last year and it didn't take long until personal comments were made. Your rules are firm and fair.
2. If anyone wants some optimism, I'd like to refer them to Steven Pinker's ENLIGHTENMENT NOW book. He's one of the most intelligent public intellectuals about. There are plenty of his talks on youtube summarising his arguments. But in a sentence, the world has never been as good as it is now for a range of indicators: crime rates, war deaths, wealth, education, longevity, progressive laws, etc. As soon as you compare how things were like 50, 100, 500, 1000 years ago, today looks great!
3. I've been around long enough to see a few dozen elections in USA / UK / Australia so I've learned not to blame the politicians as it's the PEOPLE that keep voting for them. Any anger should be directed at the mechanisms by which people are "informed" by the media, school, entertainment, church, internet, university, etc. See Chomsky  for more on this point.
4. My own position is one of secularism, science education, environmentalism, aggressive fiscal redistribution (e.g. UBI), social libertarianism, and it feels like "my side" has been losing since the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Fox/Newscorp has poisoned the well of public debate and does an extremely effective job at it... e.g. to mobilize sick people to protest against improving their own healthcare, or to get poor people to advocate for tax cuts for billionaires is astonishing. I have a perverse "admiration" for how dirty the right can fight but it saddens me too. Had a Democrat done 1% of what Trump's said/done, there'd be hoards of pitchforks (and worse) on The Mall.
5. One of the issues I wrestle with is 'tolerance of intolerance'... anyone who's listened to Sam Harris will know how to unpack this. It's one of the paradoxes that the left must grapple with. I often agree and disagree simultaneously and still working through that issue.
6. But cheer up DiFers, as the big long picture over 50-100 years is indeed in the right direction. The good guys win in the end... I hope. If they don't, we'll all be outta here soon enough.

was that the movie where they put the experimental high-tech helicopter to good use by spying on a girl doing naked exercises in her apartment?

Thanks for all your answers. Really appreciate it. If Trump pretends to be a beacon of hope to the little forgotten person in flyover states, it's weird that he'd hijack the GOP, the part that obviously (even to an outsider) only represents the wealthiest 1% of the country. That false hope should go down better if offered by a left-wing populist, like say Bernie Sanders. Even an idiot should know Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc are wholly bought by corporate lobbyists.

And then massive tax cuts to corporations and billionaires are passed, and the GOP support doesn't budge. The tribalism is so entrenched. And Democrats could promise universal health care, and sick people in rural mid-America will fervently campaign against socialised medicine.

So, yes, Trump offers false hope to poor rural people. Got that. But if a Democrat offered the same false hope, they'd be hated, even though the Democrats can demonstrate an historically (slightly) better track record.

The media has done an excellent job in painting Democrats as in bed with Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood, etc. But the message that the GOP is in bed with defense contractors, big Pharma, banks, hasn't got through.

I find it fascinating that brainwashing can be done so effectively that someone will act against their own interests. A drowning man will reject the (commie, Chinese, Jewish, liberal, insert hate group here) rope thrown to assist him.

The phenomenon of poor voting for upwards wealth redistribution certainly happens in Australia/UK as well, but to a much greater extent in the USA.

We'll see what happens in the mid-terms... it seems like a no-brainer that there should be a blue-wave after all that Trump has done/said in the last few years, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a swing towards the GOP.

Does the left have any share of the blame? Lame Pelosi/Schumer mainstream DNC? Distracted by identity politics rather than inequality? No charismatic leader to rally around?

I hear you. I can't stand the guy personally. I was just getting the ball started rather than it being a boring trump-bashathon. A few responses...

After reading Woodward's FEAR book, Trump is advised by anti-globalists i.e. non-interventionists who are opposed to more bases, more invasions, etc. Trump himself has said similar sentiments, but not that he's to be relied upon as he says a million contradictory things per day. And he's increased military spending which I'm never a fan of.

You're right... Trump COULD start a war and pile up his own mountain of bodies comparable to Cheney (who was the real president in the Dubya years) but Trump hasn't as of today. He's more concerned about getting his ego flattered. Give me an orange man-baby clown over Dr Evil and his gang of war-mongering neo-cons any day.

I don't think the welfare of the workers is a narrow definition. It's 99% of the American people. At the end of the day, it's the PEOPLE of America that is really important. What I'm proposing is that if the people were better off (and I never said they actually are, I was merely raising the possibility) than all of Trump's many personal flaws that everyone loves to mock are not as important.

And Trump may well get a third SCOTUS nominee up before his Presidency ends.

The last country to attack the USA on its home soil was Great Britain.

calling bootleggers, weren't there rumours of a Peter Jackson's KING KONG commentary, as well as BENJAMIN BUTTON, that were recorded but lost...? Perhaps the NSA has backups, Snowden if you're listening...

As Lindsay Graham correctly said the other day, if the Democrats want to get their guys appointed, they gotta start winning some elections.

Mike Moore was on Real Time last week and claimed the USA was liberal on most issues. He's probably right.

And yet, the GOP are in control of just about everything, everywhere.

But no one tried to reconcile these two facts.

Hilary had much more money, most of the media on her side, all the celebrity, political, and business endorsements, had more experience and qualifications, and got more votes, didn't grab pussies, and still lost.

I guess gerrymandering, voter suppression has something to do with it. Also, the electoral college that favors empty rural states, Fox News, right-wing radio. But still, to an outsider, it's weird that the GOP gets more than 1% of the vote - as this is the percentage of the country they make no bones about representing.

But Britain can't talk. There was a general election in 2017... the Prime Minister Theresa May ran a terrible campaign (just chanted 'strong & stable' for a month, after years of austerity and rising inequality and screwing up Brexit, and still got returned to power. In Australia too, the conservatives keep winning despite being behind in the polls between elections.

The left are just no good at playing the political game. Whereas the right can make Joe Sixpack chant 'getcha govnent hands off my cancer-ridden body' and believe healthcare is against their interests. And support tax cuts for billionaires. It is an impressive con job, but makes one depressed about human nature.

We'll see happens in the mid-terms... blue-wave, red-wave, or status-quo. Any bets? I wouldn't be surprised if nothing much changes. Millennials would have to stop taking photos of their cereal and go and vote...

My "Love-Frustration" relationship with Nolan continues...

Saw it in 70MM Imax - all the praise heaped upon its immersive realism is warranted. Some striking images. And effective sound design - it must be the loudest flick I've seen in ages. Bullet jump-scares. The diving Stuka sequences were probably the highlight.

But once again, the editing lets it down. Too fragmented. One plotline resolves, and then Nolan rewinds time to bring you another perspective. Imagine Frodo drops the Ring into the lava, the Black Tower collapses and everyone rejoices, and then it cuts to another's perspective hours earlier where we have to go through all that again.

The refusal to use much CG gives it a small-scale perspective than what we're used to. No U-boats, no tanks, only three Spitfires, one bomber, very few warships, a dozen pleasure craft, and a few queues of extras on the beach. Contrast the Greek invasion armada in Troy - admittedly that's too much in the opposite direction. Dunkirk is also completely santized of any blood 'n guts, unusual in today's war movies. Contrast with Hacksaw Ridge.

The second downside of trying to capture everything in-camera is that action scenes are disjointed and confusing as there's not enough coverage. Poor continuity too. Then add in Nolan's fucking around with chronology, and there's no emotional through-line in the narrative. It's clear by now that Nolan is a poor director of action. Also, he doesn't care much about dialogue and is happy to have none or have it drowned out by Zimmer's bombast.

Only afterwards did I realise that the beach-wharf sequences played out over a week, while the boat narrative played out over a day, and Tom Hardy's Spitfire pilot sequences played out over an hour. The title card didn't make that clear. The way it's cut (and conventional movie logic) dictates that this all should be concurrent. Afterall, it's a very simple story - men need to evacuate the beach.

There was escalating tension, but it went on too long... the boys plugging holes in the trawler, the repetitive aerial dogfights (impressive the first and second times, but got boring after a while). And man, those Spitfires can glide and glide.

Also, no context with no overall historical geographical layout, also unusual in "highbrow" historical pics. Why didn't the Germans just send 100+ planes to finish off the BEF?

In short, Nolan, in all his mature movies, leans heavily on Zimmer, IMAX, an A-list cast, and sheer chutzpah. It seems enough. He gets away with it every time, despite the short-comings in editing. His movies promise more than they deliver e.g. remember the trailer for Inception that promised you an architecture-bending mind-fuck (that Dr Strange actually delivered) and instead you got a conventional James Bond shoot-out in the snow.

But overall, Dunkirk felt more like an "DUNKIRK EXPERIENCE" that you see in a War Museum, than conventional movie.

Yep, weirdest movie since The Lobster, and even weirder than Neon Demon

We are NOT living in a Golden Age of TV

Most new TV series are far too slowly paced and vaguely written.

Yes, the production values are fine and there are some A-list actors in several series, but... nothing ever happens!

I'm talking about West World, Taboo, Emerald City, Bellevue, The OA, Mr Robot, Frontier, Walking Dead, and a dozen other high-profile series.

To anyone who says that you have to keep watching 'coz they typically don't get going until Season 2, fuck you. I can hear my beating heart counting down the seconds 'til I die when I watch these pilots. So I typically bail  somewhere between episodes 2 and 3. I think I'm being generous to TV if I give them two episodes (in movies, I normally give them between 20-30 minutes to get me hooked).

The problem with today's TV is always the same: too little plot for too much screen time. They produce these shows by the yard. In movie editing, it's about "kill your darlings" to drive down the 3-hour assembly edit to under 2 hours. In TV, it's about padding out the one-hour of plot to fill 10 episodes. They do this with lots of consequence-free false drama.

Why movies are (generally) better than TV:
* One writer makes for consistent characters and cohesive plot.
* 2-ish hours is good time to tell a story. If you have more story to tell, make it 2.5 hours or even 3 hours or a mini-series.
* Superior production values: cinematography, score, VFX, action set pieces
* Ability to go to global locations rather than just the interiors of rooms.
* Story arcs that ratchets up tension and stakes, rather than just repetition or false drama.
* Vagueness is not rewarded as "intriguing" as movies tend to resolve by the end

TV could and should be a place to explore ideas in depth, but having English-literature graduates work on, say, provocative sci-fi concepts doesn't work.

In principle, if you could have the same density of plot as a good movie, sustained throughout an entire TV season with consistency of writing, that would be great. There are some exceptions (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) but generally speaking, the view that TV is currently superior to movies is false. Perhaps if we lived 1000 year lifespans...

That's why they don't just have one pompous ceremony, but an entire season of them.