Any good current horror movies or books/comic? It seems horror has been infected with wokeness. I saw an article about Jordan Peele doing Candyman. Sad thing is he could probably write a good story but he is obsessed with race. The fawning articles about him and Ava Duvernay are absurd
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Well, the humour of Spitting Image would be really aged, since it's political humour in and of itself (and specifically British politics, at that). It does seem to be around, though. As for puppets in the 70s and 80s, puppets were mostly confined to kids' shows, Hot Fudge (feat, Arte Johnson) and Kookla, Fran and Ollie, as well as the Saturday morning Krofft crap. The Muppet Show brought puppet shows back to being respectable for adults to watch. The early-20th century music and themes brought in the very old in and of itself.
Did Reagan deserve the rap he got at the time? Well, considering most of the Reagan-fear was over being nuked, and ... we're still here ... then, I guess not. BUT in an echo of today, they had us kids/teenagers pretty much convinced we wouldn't live to see 1990, because Reagan and Breshznev (oh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Two Tribes.) A lot of cold war stuff was blazed at us before Gorbachev came along and things seemed to .. .calm down (and we started getting crap like Enemy Mine and all kinds of "Russians are just like us" stuff in the media.) And one of the tenser times came when Leonid died and was replaced by two or three geezery old hard-liners, but none of them lived very long. But yeah, we had to watch If you Love This Planet in school, and do a report on The Day After, of all things. Does any of this nonsense echo? Only it's cold war/nukes, not "muh slavery" or whatever shit this is supposed to be about this time.
I don't think there are "limitations" at all with non-humans beyond the limitation of not being able to query them directly about things. I have had to deal with humans were who intelligent (ie, not mentally damaged or really seriously lacking in IQ) who had no language/fucked up language/didn't speak my only language. I can make dumb assumptions about what I see, too, and remember, people who do things to other species in labs are fucking psychopaths, adn Descartes was excusing psychopaths who wanted him to defend nailing dogs to tables in the middle of the street while cutting them open, alive, so they could show how "smart" they were. And the same dumb assumptions have always been made about those who look different, or can't speak proper. Humans in my observations do not react any more "intelligently" in an emergency situations than anything else does, and in fact, sometimes when they DO start to think, they do the exact wrong thing. So put your human conceit aside before asking me shit like this. They're different, but they're not retards. And dogs are more like children, than Downies, and they're not lacking shit any more than humans who have no mind's eye and no internal dialogue ....... and who can't think, so it's pretty arrogant to hold on to old assumptions when we know not all HUMANS have verbal thoughts. Impulse control? A well-trained dog has that, unlike the retards that used to attack kids on our way to school .... and they would get excused when we tried to report them.
Basically, it's just funny as shit to see someone jump out of their skin when you leap out of the bushes at them. And playing, pranks and gametime is always a form of life practice, for predator and prey alike.
Yeah, it occurred to me while trying Spitting Image that I may as well go back and give the Muppet Show another chance. Satire isn't a great starting point for me to learn about british politics. But I enjoyed the puppets just for the craftsmanship. The aging wasn't all that bad - it's sort of insightful to another era and it's always interesting to see comedy from other cultures.
Your description sounds unfortunate enough. It's interesting to hear about such experiences, but I think I'd be foolish to feel any ease about modern affairs in response.
I think you've made some assumptions about me and my point. I was trying to address a psychological process with some notes of evolutionary theory. If you don't care to engage that kind of topic, that's fine, but I wanted to try to clear up that misunderstanding first.
Supposedly it's only social animals that engage in these, but I never really hear about the flipside for how animals outside that group engage in practice.
Didn't mean to sound so aggresssive, apologies.
Well, social animals are the ones that are studied the most, and solitary beasts like bears and raccoons just don't act "normally" in a lab, I would imagine. But litters of baby cats will play, and cats play all the time (I would imagine even the solitary big ones mess around like our housecats sometimes do). And only what happens in a lab under "controlled conditions" during a formal test counts according to the eggheads, at least traditionally (with wildlife cams, "spontaneous behaviour" is being dismissed less and less as "anecdotal"/one-off oddness. Because, see, it was all too easy to throw off "intelligent" behaviour as aberration or human imagination. (Now imagine raising human babies in a lab, and formally teaching them only one word at a time, and any utterance they make outside of tests doesn't count. They're all normal, but would come out looking like utter retards, I bet. This is what the ASL apes had to put up with.)
Anyway, baby bears play, everything plays. And sociality seems to be a trend in and of itself, look at how European mama bears are keeping their offspring around longer, and how utterly different the urban raccoon is from the rural breed.
As for the Reagan-era thing, well, remember that this whole "politically correct" movement seemed to start under his watch (round about 1984, actually, with comedians coming out of nowhere complaining about how "they" want the names of manhole covers and things changed. I have no idea who "they" were, and it almost seems like the jokes themselves triggered calls to get rid of the -ess suffix for certain jobs (stewardess, waitress). And now here we are. So under Trump we had the same kind of hand-wringing "he's gonna enslave us" crying, coupled with all this tranny and other nonsense bullshit ... I don't see any of this going anywhere good. Or rather, this time around I'm wondering if it isn't all smoke and mirrors, a magician's distraction from something actually important.
It'd be fascinating if they seriously went through the standard procedures and reported the results. I personally believe there's a lot of unethical testing and experimenting being done out there behind closed doors - and that's really unfortunate, but if the suffering is going to happen anyway, I'd like the data to be released so maybe someone can learn something (but then you'd have to fire/convict those involved, so that's why it's not released). It's only a real problem when you start excusing it, whether for results, convenience, or ideology. (excluding the occasional guy driven by curiousity, that's a whole other issue)
More on the point, though, how far would you be willing to extend the ability to socialize/play/practice? Would you extend it to insects? Bacteria? It's a strain to my imagination to apply it to those two groups. Especially bacteria brings up a large amount of new ethical issues. The thought processes involved would be widely ridiculed, so I can certainly understand the lack of effort towards testing it (risking career credibility).
The expected rigor of the scientific process is kind of a double edged sword. I respect it for making reproducable results, but sometimes I think it makes simple questions into complex chores. Ideally, you'd just have the individual pursue it, but if my question is something seemingly silly, like whether a leopard likes playing frisbee catch, I'd have to get my hands on a leopard first because I don't expect silly things to get reported publicly.
This is a constant nagging worry for me. Especially when I hear about something occurring from a recent time period where I know I was trying to pay attention, then I look it up and it turned out I completely missed it at the time. Sort of a losing game, but I keep coming back to the table for another round.
It's interesting to hear about the surge of problems occurring in Reagan era. I'm fairly convinced of the "long march through the institutions" strategy being employed, but that carries a number of implications with it. I hadn't really considered that it might be happening in a scale larger than the USA, for instance; I thought maybe whatever nefarious group was hopping around for soft targets. So now I'm led to consider it more closely tied to globalist interests.
What'd be really interesting is to know if this 10-20 year skip in agenda-pushing (the fallout takes years to settle each time, so maybe it was an intentional strategy) has been a regular trend, but we'd need some sample reports from the 60s-70s and I don't have any connections that old. Then again, we had a big tech thing with the internet and cellphones, so maybe it forced some moves to be made.
Well, 10-20 years equals one human generation (the time it takes a baby to grow to sexual maturity).
With Canada, you can sort of map the changes, starting with the change of flag from the Red Ensign to what looks a lot like a generic corporate logo, PETs "multicultural mosaic" and the utterly unnecessary switch to metric in the 70s, the change of Constitution in 1980, the Singh Decision in 1984, the rescinding of the Baby Bonus followed almost immediately by mass immigration being a thing under Mulroney (who distracted everyone from that with his rousing the hornet's nest of Separatism, and the GST and dancing with Reagan) .....
In the 60s and 70s, big tech was actually probably a lot bigger. In the USA, you had Ma Bell before it was broken up, and, well, Canada still runs more or less on monopolies (based on who used to be the local phone provider - Bell Canada in Ontario, for instance, or SaskTel, NorthWestTel in northern BC/Territories, and what is now Telus - but there's also Rogers and Shaw now. We've always had the most expensive phone/cell phone bills in the world ... I would say that cell phone adoption was slower in Canada than most other places because of the ridiculous prices they used to charge.)
You also had RCA, and Zenith .... and a lot of other things that were American/North American based. But now you have transnational superconglomerate corporations that are unlike anything human society has ever seen, and is a sort of structure you usually only see in eusocial things like ants and bees. But it's certainly the end result - or part of the process - of all the "growth" and the collection of massive amounts of resources. It's basically part of the evolution of an out of control technological species, but lord knows where that evolution is going to lead next. Either space, or the next mass extinction that will take humans with it, after humans are done converting the Earth's waste back into plant-usable carbon.
Do insects and bacteria play? They sent a slime mould through a maze .... and then there's the cephalopods. So I wouldn't put anything past anything. The trick is, recognizing things for what they are. But hey, in the space realm, we have Avi Loeb ... (and hey, if we send out probes, for sure a nearby, more advanced civilization might have that idea, too, and be better at it. And hell, they've found planets literally everywhere since they found the first one only, what, 30 years ago? We could be lousy with probes, but we just aren't seeing them/don't recognize them, because, really, we just started looking beyond our own human asses.