So the only question really is whether they’re arranging things so that as China becomes the clear world leader in the coming era, the US will be relegated to being a bankrupt has-been, clinging to outdated technology nobody else wants any more because their explicit goal is to destroy the US or just because they’re some stunning combination of corrupt and stupid.
I lean toward the latter, but can’t entirely discount the former.
Karl Urban
Honorable mention: Harry Dean Stanton, Sam Rockwell, Jean Reno…
One of the definitive 80s songs, and one of my all-time favorites.
No.
(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.
Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.
It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.
My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.
The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.
Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.
I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…
True.
It’s cynically amusing that it’s reached the point that a focus on one dishonest part of a Trump Republicsns story runs the risk of missing another dishonest part.
Or more precisely, judge blocks administration from human trafficking.
Shh!
Don’t let the Republicans know that their cynical attempt to further depress voter turnout is going to disproportionately affect their own supporters!
Yes.
And even beyond that - hierarchical systems effectively reward and thus select for psychopathy.
People with morals, ethics, integrity and/or empathy will refrain from making choices that would conflict with their principles, while people without any of those things are free to pursue any course of action that will benefit them, with no concern for anything else.
So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchical systems.
And it shows.
If the world was a just place, it would cost them their lives, since by cutting the sole source of healthcare funding for many of the poorest Americans, they’re effectively committing mass murder, so should be tried, and if convicted, sentenced just as any other mass murderers would be.
Or better yet, if they were just minimally decent human beings, they wouldn’t condemn poor people to avoidable sickness and death in the first place.
So… Trump voters?
I think they’re analogous to people who would stand and watch a stoning, then congratulate themselves on not having thrown any rocks themselves.
Meaning is subjective and not intrinsic, so there can be no such thing as “the” meaning of anything.
The artist can have an intended meaning, but the audience not only can but will find their own meaning in it. It might be the case that the audience gets the same meaning from it that the creator intended, but it might just as easily be the case that they get some entirely different meaning from it.
None of them are right or wrong - that’s not even a coherent concept in that context. They just are whatever they are.