Posts by Paul Litterick
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Kracklite: I don't think you are sufficiently interesting to be rude, merely long-winded and prone to read an awful lot into what I said; such is your geek = Aspergers assumption and your determination to be offended.
ScottY: my observation was based on experience; such obsessions are harmless, but they are not very helpful.
Emma: yes; next time I will just quit and go.
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No, if the TV show is thought to be relevant to the discussion, that is a different matter. But when someone barges in to talk about something irrelevant, that is rude.
In any case, most geek culture enthusiasms are really not that profound. It is just that most geeks have not read anything outside their preferred genres, and that most geeks are very literal-minded.
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..'you ruined this important discussion with your dumbass pop culture' is a turn in the conversation I dig somewhat less.
Each to her own. I find people hijacking conversations to enthuse about their favourite television programmes or their sex lives to be very rude.
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Firstly, as has been pointed out before, PAS is something of an oasis of intelligent debate. If you have to put up with a few Star Trek references to get to the gold, then that's the price you're going to have to pay.
I agree about the oasis and I am prepared to tolerate people going on and on and on about their fantasy fetishes. I just wish they would not hijack discussions about more important matters, as has happened here.
Secondly, the two things aren't mutually exclusive. I can enjoy BSG and be fairly clued up on the state of global politics. Or am I never allowed to relax from my eternally vigilent status as gatekeeper of freedom?
At ease, soldier. What bothers me is folk who think their preferred allegory is so important and so true that no further action is required: the truth as revealed by this season's space opera is so self-evident that the Government surely will fall. The neo-cons did not do allegory (or satire, for that matter). They just lied and made people believe them. What was needed to make them fall was concerted political action, not leisure activities.
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Craig, I think the point of the matter is that people in DC were not watching Battlestar Galactica; they were watching Fox News. They were probably relieved that the liberals were watching sci-fi sagas and reading comic books (sorry, graphic novels) rather than doing anything that threatened authority. Doubtless, allegory is a wonderful thing, but it does not change anything.
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To grumpily imply that because someone likes Battlestar Galactica the world's gone to Hell in a handcart is a non sequitur - especially so since that show was so clearly aimed at thoroughly demolishing the 'us versus them' ethos of the Bush administration.
As Peter Cook once said, "The best satire of the 20th century was the Weimar cabaret, and they managed to stop Hitler in his tracks."
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Maybe, just maybe, if people were more interested in history than fantasy then we might not be in this mess.
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I managed to grab Tory! Tory! Tory!, the BBC doco about the rise of Thatcherism, in the words of those who were there.
I was there. It was weird. The Tories did not realise, until too late, that Thatcher was not a conservative. It should have been easy for them: they were all chaps and had known each other since Eton (I am not making this up). She clearly was not one of them. But they gave in to her irresistible force. And so everything was changed. People exchanged long-held beliefs for new doctrines, because everyone else was doing it.
I suppose Labour under Lange and Douglas was much the same. That period should serve as a warning, but I am sure it will not.
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In Britain we had something called the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, which channeled money from the Football Pools to worthy causes. Its name always made me think of Dances with Wolves.
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.The truth is, you take away our moodiness and you take away a part of us. We live on moody land and if we understood that better we might understand why we are not Australians or Americans and just get on with it.
But then we would break the spell