LOL, I’m honored, thanks!

I kinda thought of it as, “My native tongue is as ancient as the seas, as foundational as the mountains, as incomprehensible to you as the stars are to ants. Anyway, 2000 years ago I had to hire a guy to translate that into one of your languages just so you people could sign a fucking contract. It was a huge mess, guy took twice as long as he quoted me, legal department rejected it three times before it go approved, the whole thing went way over budget. Long story short, I’m not updating the paperwork. You can Google it if you want the fine print.”

I view Platner as a sort of political Pascal’s wager. Let’s say there’s a 10% chance of him being a secret Nazi or the next Fetterman. Hell, let’s say it’s 50%. The alternative was Mills, a centrist hand-picked by fascist collaborator Chuck Schumer, and Collins, a member of fhe fascist party. The loss of electing a secret fascist over a fascist collaborator or different fascist is minimal, while the gain of electing a genuine progressive is massive. You might as well make the bet that he’s genuine.

Yeah, I thought that was the general consensus too, but I couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just an echo chamber I’d created with my friend group.

I actually thought 4 was better than 2 and 3. Not that 4 was very good, but I thought 2 and 3 suffered from an attempt to, “trilogize,” the series and make it a grand epic. It was clear by the end of the third movie that they didn’t know where they were going with all of the plot threads they’d set up like Calypso, the Brethren Court, the Jack/Elizabeth/Will love triangle they were hinting at…just way to many ideas and very little payoff. At least 4 told a coherent story in one movie, even if it wasn’t a very good story.

I would argue that Blade II is the better movie. Guillermo del Toro is a much more interesting director, and the Reapers are basically a dry run for his take on Vampires in The Strain.

Well, as long as you have a plan.

I don’t think any of them were staged, but this seems much more likely than the others. The fact that this was the only Correspondence Dinner he attended, the generally muted reactions from most of the administration…it seems like them allowing this shootee to get as far as he did seems very possible. The fact that they seemed so pleased with themselves afterwards at least says that they see this as a big opportunity.

I think that’s a pretty big misread though. Outside of MAGA diehards and pearl clutching media elites, the reactions I’ve been seeing online vary from, “it’s fake,” to, “who gives a shit?” They’re not going to be able to capitalize on this the same way they did in 2024.

How will you know when you’re being bombed?

You might be able to get the point of the show across in 30 seconds, but it’s hard to set the vibe. Think about how much atmosphere Batman: TAS built in the minute-plus intro. Besides, it’s not like that time is going towards the episode length; TV shows have gone from 24 minutes in the late 80s/early 90s to 21 minutes in the 2000s, and all that extra time went to commercials. It would be nice if they could at least give 30 seconds back towards a good theme song.

These answers are a testament to how much better theme songs were before the 2000s, especially for kids shows. You used to get a minute and a half of hype music to introduce new viewers to the show or psych up returning viewers. Now, even the best ones, like Gravity Falls, are less then 40 seconds.

This is probably the correct answer. I don’t particularly like or dislike Cheers, and it went off the air when I was five, but even as a child, that theme song gave me a deep, nostalgic yearning for something I cannot articulate.

The extended version is a fucking banger. Guy makes duck songs with his guitar. Hendrix might have been able to make a guitar sing, but I never heard him make it quack.

“When I agreed to work for a well known techno-facist to develop exactly the kind of surveillance tool a facist state would kill for, I had no idea this would descend into fascism!”

Really struggling to understand why they thought, “giant spying program indiscriminately gathering data on everyone in the wold,” was ever a good thing.

Here the original sketch.

Yeah, agree on all points. Personally, I’ve been getting a little sick of the discourse on the left about Platner. A lot of people’s take has become, “fuck Platner, he’s a Nazi, he’s gonna be the next Fetterman,” and it doesn’t go any further than that. If you’re skeptical of Platner, fair enough, but then you have to articulate a better alternative. Do you think Mills would be safer? Is there another leftist to support? If you don’t have a better vision, that’s just doomerism, and at that point, you’re just doing the fascists’ work for them.

I can see a very intoxicated group of young marines in a foreign port making a poor decision and getting a cool looking tattoo together without really thinking what it means.

Yeah, I think this the most likely scenario, I just don’t believe it was never realized it was also a Nazi thing. There’s even a deleted Reddit thread where they’re discussing the totenkopf, and he comments on soldiers using the Punisher skull iconography without knowing where it comes from. There’s just no way he didn’t realize, at any point, that his tattoo was also a Nazi tattoo.

Agreed that it’s unlikely he’s a secret Nazi, but given the tattoo, we can’t rule it out entirely. I definitely think he’s not telling the entire truth about it, though.

The official story is that he got the tattoo in Croatia while he was a marine and he had no idea it was a Nazi tattoo until it came to light during the campaign, and I don’t buy that for a second. Maybe he got it because he was a far-right extremist in his 20s, maybe he got it having no idea what it was, but there’s no way he made it through 6 more years in the military and then the rest of his adult life without someone going, “Hey Graham, you know that’s a Nazi tattoo, right?”

And when I say, “some kind of Groyper,” I mean, generally, a far-right troll. Platner’s only a little older than me, and there were plenty of people getting pilled on 4chan when I was in my early 20s. I wouldn’t be surprised if Platner made some regrettable posts on /pol/ when he was younger, but if he did, I don’t think he believes them now.

I’m least worried about the Reddit comments. I think he addressed them well by going through them chronologically and showing, “yes, I said some shitty stuff between 2009-2013, but if you look at the last 5 years, I’m clearly saying the opposite of that. These are shitty views that I outgrew.”

The Nazi tattoo has not been well addressed, to my mind. I can believe that he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol when he got it. I can’t believe that he didn’t find out, in 20 years of having it, that it was a Nazi tattoo. I think he might have been some sort of Groyper when he was younger, and while (like the things he said in Reddit) I think he outgrew that, I don’t think he wants to admit it.

That being said, Platner seems like a genuine progressive, but there is a small chance he is actually secret Nazi, while Mills is a centrist hand-picked by Schumer, who has spent the last two years capitulating to Nazis. Seems to me that there isn’t much difference between a Nazi and a Nazi collaborator, so you might as gamble on Platner being genuine rather than hand Schumer and the collaborators another vote.