John Rogers
@jonrog1
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TV, comics and film writer. LEVERAGE, JACKIE CHAN ADVENTURES, BLUE BEETLE, MARRY ME, among others. Free newsletter at https://t.co/oLwsGxytrH
Los Angeles
Joined April 2009
Just pinning this tweet so when the family separation and internment techniques are used on US families after major cities start becoming permanently broken by climate disasters, they can't say "nobody saw this coming.".
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As one of the credited writers of CATWOMAN, I believe I have the authority to say: because it was a shit movie dumped by the studio at the end of a style cycle, and had zero cultural relevance either in front of or behind the camera. This is a bad take. Feel shame.
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Anyone dismissing Beto O'Rourke's actions as political theater are ignoring the fact that politics are, in fact, theater. "Hey, that dude seems as visibly angry at the same shit I'm angry at" is how Trump got elected.
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1/ Okay, you racist hack, apparently I have to do this every time. Like all conspiracy theories, this falls apart as soon as one asks "How?"
I am hearing rumors that black voters from MS were encouraged to cross over into AL and vote. Anyone else hearing this? Anything to it? That might explain the 30% turnout higher than population percentage. Just reporting the rumor.
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We . we . worked for five years making a television show about the corruption of capitalism, and he just tweeted it out.
Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.
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I say this as a rich person: $400k a year is not middle class. You *are* a rich person, you’re just living in a city contrived to be *comfortably accessible only to you and other rich people*, and you’re suffering the consequent local economic distortions. There’s a difference.
400K is legit middle class in NY/SF/Seattle/LA/Miami. Gotta account for that with a cost of living calculation.
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People mocking 1/6 cops’ emotions and Simone Biles Olympic decision really brings home that we’re way past partisan divide and dealing with the fact that somehow, over the last half century, our predominantly religious culture raised a hundred million Americans without empathy.
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Yet another evening I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, take two short sharp breaths and remind myself millions of people led satisfying, meaningful lives during the fall of the Roman Empire.
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Newt, people's feelings change. One day everybody loves a statue, then suddenly they just want a new younger statue that doesn't have cancer
Newt Gingrich: Mayors who take down Confederate statues are just pandering to a black audience
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1/ On the left is a teenage AOC dancing with her friends as part of a nationwide viral video craze. The Right called this proof she’s a “nitwit”. Next is GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Who thought this photo was a good idea AT AGE 42. He was considered a policy genius.
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1) Something (very stupid) you’re going to see over the next weeks are people arguing that screenwriters are being unreasonable. “Times have changed”. No. Times WERE changed. By SOMEBODY. By PEOPLE, making CHOICES.
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So basically the last month has been. FANS: We want a SANDMAN true to the original vision of the creator!.GAIMAN: I spent 30 years fighting off corporate overlords trying to make bad versions, and finally I have the power to the show as I see it. FANS: . not like that. (1/2).
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It's insane to have to say this, but apparently we do -- no billionaire needs defending, They're billionaires, *They will always be fine*. Particularly not billionaires who live in countries that allow them to sue casual online critics into silence. This is unhinged.
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I for one am shocked that Elon Musk has the worldview that when somebody with a lot of power engages in a poorly thought out scheme and it begins to fail, that it's everybody else's responsibility to just go along and appease them.
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Well, I wasn’t sure before, but I will now take “How many of those kids did the Uvalde police shoot?” for $300, Alex.
Texas police are refusing to release the bodycam footage of the Uvlade school shooting to Motherboard because they claim it could be used by other shooters to determine "weaknesses" in cop response to crimes. Asked state Attorney General to block release
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I'd forgotten, having made a joke about capitalism, that an entire chunk of Americans online believe there's a socialism/capitalism binary, and are apparently unaware that there were *centuries* of trade, merchants, and compensated labor before the the late 1700's.
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I co-create and run the only aggressively anti-capitalist TV crime show in two decades and I don’t make the right wing ban list on Twitter? What the hell am I even DOING this for?.
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Dead? You fools. She has sailed into the West, and will remain Betty White.
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1) A quick thread on what we, in TV writing, call the Idiot Ball. This is a term used to describe when one character, in order to make the show work, has to behave, uncharacteristically, like a complete idiot. It is usually a different character each week.
My Sunday column: Do Liberals Care If Books Disappear?:.
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15/ I'm sorry, I know this is dumb, but I used to write cons & heists for a living. And very few things piss me off like sloppy heist plotting. And racism. So this is a two-fer.
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The utter insanity of watching a failed casino owner argue with a doctor live on TV about the possible effectiveness of an untested drug, and that half this country says “Yeah, OF COURSE I believe the orange hotelier over the doctor”, this is real fall of Rome stuff.
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2017: I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People. 2021: I Don't Know How To Explain To You That Other People Are People.
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They lost ten times what it would’ve cost them to give us everything we asked for. These are not rational people, and this is no longer a rational business.
Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Says Company Wants to Resolve Strikes ASAP After Disclosing up to $500 Million Earnings Hit From Work Stoppages
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15/ And if the cultural shift is “Greed is *not* good. We gotta take care of each other” or “rebellion isn’t secret drinking and naughty-giggle sex but actually giving a shit about other people’s dignity” … I’m okay with that.
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To be honest, I'm more amused picturing the various Chinese, Saudi, Russian etc. intelligence agents who went to Mar-a-Lago for two years, who are currently sweating in their offices waiting for their boss to call and ask them why the FUCK they didn't get copies of these papers.
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I work in Hollywood, a cesspool of broken people who are yawning voids of need, and I am genuinely stunned at how the last few weeks have revealed VC and grind culture as an even greater expanse of toadying, ego-stroking and narcissistic climaxing.
The conquest of Wokerosi is complete. Melt them down and turn them into an Iron Throne.
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Next time you’re kicking out propaganda, don’t shoot so high res. You can see he’s literally just writing with a sharpie in the middle of a blank piece of paper in the second one.
Just released by the @WhiteHouse: Two official Joyce Boghosian photos showing #coronavirus patient @POTUS working inside his @WRBethesda hospital site.
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FANS: We want a LOTR show true to the original version of Tolkien. TOLKIEN ESTATE: Finally, we get to consult on this version of the story, not like those LOTR movies!.FANS: . not like that. (2/2).
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I really wish we had one state where we just let all the “taxation is theft” fuckwits live. You rock that out. Everybody thinks they’ll be Mad Max in the cool dystopia. You won’t be. You’ll be the guy who gets murdered for your chickens.
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Hey, no joke, and I'm paraphrasing smarter people. If you plan on opposing Trump:. Get Tor. Get Signal. Get a VPN.2FA on your emails. Now.
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On the lighter side, my 80 year old parents both told me "Be careful!" on our phone call this weekend, and I was puzzled, then my mom clarified ". if they send people to break the strike." I forgot they saw shit even in the 60's.
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"Writers are lucky to have term employment." .-Carol Lombardini, AMPTP. Congratulations Carol, with one quote you wiped out the doubt of every writer who wasn't sure this negotiation really IS so important, that it actually IS about turning us into gig workers.
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From IATSE to John Deere to Kellog to Instacart, it's amazing how many of these labor actions are not asking industries that are making record profits to share those greater profits, but increase pay just enough or cut hours enough so the workers can *live*.
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@MartinKulldorff Personally I'm thrilled you managed to go back to working at Harvard after you awoke from your coma during the entire AIDS crisis. God bless the rehab clinic.
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I am not a religious man, but I will offer a devout prayer that in 2018 every genre fan learns to close their eyes, take deep breath, say “Perhaps that is for other people to enjoy,” and move on.
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I know. Imagine if the London terrorists had access to guns, they could, say, stroll into a gay nightclub and kill 49 people instead of 6.
Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!.
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1) Holy shit, this photo of a police sniper aiming his weapon directly at the armed militia in the Michigan State House *taps ear* no, I'm sorry, that's a sniper pointing his weapon at unarmed black protesters, including children, at Ferguson. Apologies. Let me switch feeds.
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5/ What’s “rebellion” in Louis CK’s mind? “finger banging and jello shots:” . That is the most white bread creepy dad staring at teens in the food court binge-drinking Brett Kavanaugh image of rebellion I can imagine.
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Probably shouldn’t have turned our careers into a series of 10 week contacts with five months between ‘em if you didn’t want writers with endurance for a strike. They *trained* us for this.
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"So our number one franchise show is shut down."."Yes."."How much money are we saving by not giving them what they want?"."Almost nothing. Like, less than 2% of our profits."."Perfect. Stay on course.". If I were a Netflix shareholder, I'd have questions, But that's just me.
Duffers here. Writing does not stop when filming begins. While we’re excited to start production with our amazing cast and crew, it is not possible during this strike. We hope a fair deal is reached soon so we can all get back to work. Until then -- over and out. #wgastrong.
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HOW DARE YOU CALL THEM CONCENTRATION CAMPS?!. US JEWS: Pretty much are. THINK OF HOW YOU'RE OFFENDING THE JEWS!. US JEWS: we are offended by . the concentration camps, yes. UNLESS PEOPLE ARE MURDERED, IT'S NOT A CONCENTRATION CAMP!. US JEWS: dude. we are standing right here.
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13/ If you were okay with Paul Ryan’s Potemkin village brain, Donald Trump’s fake billionaire bluster, Bush’s fake cowboy brush-clearing, Jerry Falwell Jr’s fake Christianity, if that’s *legitimacy* to you — congratulations, you rode it ’til it broke. But you *broke it*.
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4/ Now to Louis CK’s set, bemoaning youth aren’t rebelling, they’re just talking about what pronouns they want to use. Because UPENDING CENTURIES-OLD GENDER NORMS MAINTAINED BY THE MOST POWERFUL CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS ON EARTH OFTEN ON PAIN OF DEATH isn’t *rebelling* in his mind.
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7) But remember, the ball's just the ball. The person carrying it's the idiot.
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I don't know -- actually I think I do, but that's a long bit of writing -- how people started thinking there was a "right" version of art, but it's a nasty little instinct.
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Your occasional reminder that MARRY ME starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson happened because I saw a physical copy of the indie comic on a folding table in the San Diego Comic-Con in 2008. So,you know, finish your damn comic. Or whatever you make. Make it.
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6/ Louis can’t see what kids are rebelling against, because they’re rebelling against *him*. Turning against *that behavior* as quote unquote cool *is* the rebellion. Cue the reference to Kuhn’s “when you’re in the paradigm you can’t see the paradigm”.
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Huh, remember that time a Senator from Texas incited an insurrection that stormed the Capitol to kill this Congresswoman from NYC, then that Congresswoman turned around and raised $1 million to house & feed Texans during a disaster while that Senator fucked off to Cancun? Crazy.
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I don’t care who you are, you stand when you meet Buzz Aldrin.
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Whenever I try to get people to understand where they *actually* are in the class war, the reminder that "you are *always* three very bad months away from being homeless, but *never* three very good months away from being a millionaire", can be clarifying.
RT @trekafta The sooner you realize everybody is one or two tragedies from homelessness/poverty/bankruptcy/disaster, the sooner you're capable of compassion for just about anybody.
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10/ Then these 40,000 or so fake voters -- like, the number of troops who hit Utah Beach on D-Day -- stroll in and HAVE ID SINCE ALABAMA HAS STRICT ID LAWS, and ARE ALREADY REGISTERED. Holy shit, the conspiracy!.
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The correct framing is not “$400k a year in NYC/Seattle/Miami/LA is middle class”, the correct framing is “Jesus, do you see how little being rich buys you in NYC/Seattle/Miami/LA?” Because the first reinforces the status quo and the second points you to the problems & solutions.
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I'm an infamously even-tempered man, but if you take Terry Pratchett's name in vain for some small-minded bigoted fuckwittery I will push you down a set of fucking stairs and laugh at the bounce.
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8/ So, right now your brilliant conspiracy has some genius renting 800 buses from, well, how many buses does one company have, say a couple dozen companies, all on the same day, requiring 800 drivers who ALSO have to be in on it. And still. Nobody. Notices.
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12/ Cue Ben Shapiro’s “how DARE she not debate me, she has to, why else did Daddy pay for my fancy degrees if I can’t use them to prove I’m better?”. I mean holy shit what kind of world do we live in if we live in a world where HARVARD. DOESN’T. MATTER?.
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Reminder: despite this recurring moral panic, the only documented case of a child being poisoned or injured by adulterated Halloween candy was a boy poisoned by a cyanide Pixy stick in 1974 by his *own father*, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, for insurance money. Stranger danger, indeed.
BEWARE: As Halloween gets closer, @BensalemPolice are warning parents to LOOK at your child’s candy before they eat it. They confiscated these snacks that look a lot like the real thing. All are laced with THC @6abc
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1/ This. Regardless of how all this falls out, the fact Grassley had a list of 65 women from Kavanaugh's high school as character witnesses LINED UP is literally the biggest, dumbest tell that they knew this was coming down the pike. Even wait until Monday, for chrissake.
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16/ In the meantime, this is going to get ugly as shit, so hold on tight. /xx.
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Man, it’d hbe a nice time to rebrand Warren’s 2% wealth tax as the “COVID recovery fund for the front line workers” and let them choke on that PR war.
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6/ So apparently the Soros conspiracy finds 40,000 paid votes without anybody noticing. Nobody leaks. Nobody tells a friend. Not a single slip-up. That is some fucking OPSEC.
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The utterly maddening thing is that they’re burning the country down not for some smooth, brilliant orator and politician, but for one of the worst, dumbest, generally useless humans to exist in the public sphere for the last fifty years.
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9/ But raise a generation deprived of any sense of secrecy and no social safety net yet the belief anyone can rise on any given day, and the tools of shame and status are much less effective. Digital natives *do not give a shit* about how older people view them.
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@JunkScience @ezraklein Sir, I've done some research and I've discovered that both slaveowners and Nazis drank water. May I DM you with these exciting results, so that you can promote them?.
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10/ So we get a meltdown because a bunch of middle-aged dudes are suddenly realizing their definitions of socially acceptable/cool can no longer be enforced and a bunch of elderly dudes are realizing the status structure they’ve learned to manipulate is cracking.
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2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!.
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They JUST. GOT. AIR CONDITIONING.
INBOX: @Teamsters win "historic" UPS contract, with wage increases for full time workers, in addition to a doubling wages for part-timers, end to the controversial two-tier contract known as 22.4, and the company agreed to install A/C's in all trucks after Jan. 2024, and more.
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To be clear, whenever a gun fan says “hey, if you want to be a sitting duck, go ahead, but I need to defend myself”, they’re saying “I’m willing to let thousands die and children get shot so I’m not afraid. Because I’m SO AFRAID.” . Go ahead and say it loud and proud. Coward.
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There are a lot of people out here making cracks about people getting tuition relief for fancy liberal arts degrees who have never looked up how much it costs to get certified as a cosmetologist in Missouri.
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14/ I'm not saying “Burn the old, only the new is good!” That’s how you get the French Revolution and fucking disco. But I think this one of the first times in the country’s short (and it is *short*) history we’ve had a serious cultural shift without a war in the middle of it.
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3) Bullshit. Economies, markets, are products of human thought. They are shaped by the rules we place upon them and distorted by the will of those who operate within them.
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6) They’ve decided to chase the classic techbro, financialization metric, the mania of modern Wall Street — growth. Nonstop growth. Something you can base stock options on. But as the man says, the only thing that grows forever is cancer, and even that eventually kills the host.
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I didn't think i'd have to post this refresher, but apparently, a reminder is necessary:
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Are there suddenly white trucks full of electrical equipment on your street? Is that unusually attractive person in the local coffee shop wearing a ball cap and avoiding eye contact? You may have stumbled upon a location shoot! Let us know at tips@wga.org so we can . visit.
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2) This term was coined, I heard, by actor Hank Azaria, who was complaining about a show he was on and asked "who's carrying the idiot ball this week?" The modern conservative intellectual movement is now reduced to passing around the idiot ball.
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14/ At least have a modicum of dignity and claim the machines were hacked.
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You know how we kept saying when we based the LEVERAGE villains on real people, we always had to rewrite them because the real people were unbelievably evil?.
Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: "We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around."
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2/ Let's just go with the most popular right-wing conspiracy, George Soros (because, of course, you blame a Jew, you fucks) bussed in enough out of state black people to win Doug Jones the election.
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3/ Paul Ryan, whose his singular achievement *in his 20 year career* was blowing a trillion dollar hole in the economy, got the easy ride because he fit a stereotype of “cool” for certain journalists — *and older men*. Confident, square-jawed, serious talk.
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13/ 20,000-40,000 fake voters, all recruited secretly, paid somehow, transported in hundreds of buses with hundreds of drivers, no witnesses, no leaks, no paper trail, voting in dozens of stations, no witnesses, with 10k forged ID's.
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"Wow,. so aliens, wow. Um do you want to meet our leaders or --"."No, we're just here to talk to the dogs."."What?"."We plant dogs on developing planets, wait a few 1000 years and then see how you've treated them. Test never failed us.".
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Yes yes, “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”, as the joke goes, but the problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of other people.
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4) Freedom Fries. Antifa. Dr. Seuss. Millions of missing ballots. Neanderthals. Ordinarily smart people have to pretend to be earnestly dumb and make idiotic arguments about each of these, or be tossed from the show.
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7/ We then have to bus them in. The standard transit bus carries about 45 people. School buses can go higher. Let's say 50. So that's 2 busses per hundred, 20 buses per thousand, that's about 800 buses?.
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Look, from one point of view I'm a successful showrunner working in his creative field of choice and responsible for millions of dollars of production money. And yet, every day I fight the urge to get liquored up and play FALLOUT 4 for 12 hours. Just know that never goes away.
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Reminder from now on (although it was always a good idea). Never engage. Never retweet. Block and move on. Block and move on.
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6) So now, you have the shorthand. Whenever you hear some ridiculous fake scandal or outrage, you can just chalk it up to "Oh, it's this week's Idiot Ball" and it says everything you need to know about both the subject, and the person carrying it.
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*stares in Iroquois Confederacy*.
CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture"
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Hey, no joke, and I'm paraphrasing smarter people. If you plan on opposing Trump:. Get Tor. Get Signal. Get a VPM.2FA on your emails. Now.
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I've made peace with "we're going to burn billions of dollars and thousands of jobs over ten years to recreate cable television", but I am just goddam not going to go along with the kabuki theater of pretending these rocket scientists are *inventing* it just now.
David Zaslav Explains Why Bundling Is the Future of Streaming. #future #streaming.
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9) So this struggle may seem like a very specialized conflict, between a very small Guild of unusual professionals and their very specific employers. But this is 100% part of the larger madness that’s drowning the modern economy. It’s all the same fight, this one’s just nerdier.
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Hi David. Unlike you I had a real job once, bartending and waitering. So let me help you. This means you were an asshole during the meal, and your waiter could only summon fake enthusiasm when cheered by the thought you were leaving. Glad to help.
Waiters are 87% friendlier as they hand me the bill and I’m about to decide the tip amount than they are at any other point in the meal.
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"My doctor said I'd die of cancer if I didn't get chemotherapy, but now that I've had chemotherapy he says I probably won't die. So why did he make me do chemotherapy?"? is the sort of galaxy brain bullshit we are going to be living with for the next year, and it's EXHAUSTING.
Nobody says COVID-19 is not real, that it can't tax hospitals or kill people, esp. if they are over 75 or have comorbidities. But right now the best CURRENT projection is for 61,000 US deaths. That was the 2017 flu season. Why have we shut the country?.
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Just saw a reply to a Hurricane Ian flooding footage tweet "Don't worry, Floridians are tough people" and jesus christ on a stick this American obsession with manliness, toughness, suffering as virtue is going to be what destroys this country.
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I think things are going to get very rough and angry as middle class white people, this generation, for the first time, join their more diverse neighbors in discovering that no, poor people aren't just poor because they make bad choices. The illusion held up for a long time.
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3) Dr. Seuss is this week's idiot ball, and in order to be part of the show, you have to carry it. You have to make bad faith or stupid arguments to be part of the show. The difference is, now, *everybody* has to pass the idiot ball around, all episode.
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4) The Hollywood market is currently being distorted by choices made by powerful people with considerable agency. The most foolish of these choices is to no longer make the metric of success be … well, success.
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8) THIS IS NOT NEW. This is classic vulture capitalism, this is what happened to K-mart, Toys R’ US, this is airline stock buybacks, it’s just moved from hard infrastructure and retail to the information and entertainment world.
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