MovieChat Forums > Darren
Darren (1455)
Posts
Not as good as the original, but I enjoyed it
The Obsolete Man
I always found it funny that David's parents didn't come to London.
Has anybody here read a real book about vampires...
Post-apocalypse people shouldn't have needed dogs to spot terminators
So how did St. Olaf massacre the trolls?
Possibly the most definitively American movie ever made
What is your favorite episode?
An interesting omission from the movie
Steve's '80s fashion scenes.
View all posts >
Replies
And something else occurred to me about all this. Trump's orders for staff reduction are very specific in stating that <i>workers in safety roles are exempt.</i> So given this, just how are people in critical positions getting let go?
I've seen these articles about nuclear safety workers that have been "accidentally" laid off, and I've also seen some about the USDA "accidentally" laying off workers investigating food safety and bird flu. Again, given these safety roles are supposed to be exempt, why is this happening?
I can't prove anything, but I <i>strongly</i> suspect this is very similar to the Air Force recently removing references to the Tuskegee Airmen and the WAAC's from its curriculum (before being ordered to put those things back): malicious compliance -- i.e. when Trump issues an order, "resistance" types in government who oppose him deliberately misinterpret it, or interpret it overly literally in order to create incidents exactly like these, and thereby undermine the administration with chaos and negative press.
And I think you're an fearmongering leftist idiot trying to create an enormous crisis where there isn't one <i>at all.</i>
Try actually looking into this, instead of just mindlessly regurgitating superficial talking points from a media that has proven, again and again over the last eight years, that it is unremittingly hostile to Trump, and always puts the worst possible spin on anything he does. Try reading the whole articles, and not just the headlines, and you'll see some important facts buried in there with all the alarmism.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trump-musk-nuclear-weapons-workers-nnsa/78968238007/
<blockquote>A spokesman for the Department of Energy... told USA TODAY less than 50 workers had their jobs terminated. About 325 NNSA workers initially received notices late last week that they had been laid off...</blockquote>
This is <i>not</i> the crisis you're making out.
<blockquote>The Associated Press reported about 30% of the cuts were at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. Some of the fired NNSA employees worked on areas that aren't priorities to the Trump administration such as energy efficiency and climate change... but others dealt with nuclear issues, <b>though not directly with the agency's weapons programs.</b></blockquote>
(emphasis added)
<blockquote>An Energy Department spokesman said the terminated NNSA employees "were probationary employees and held primarily administrative and clerical roles."</blockquote>
So what we have here is a a bunch of <i>probationary</i> employees (i.e. with little time on the job), who work mostly <i>in administrative and clerical roles</i> got laid off, and the needed ones were quickly rehired.
Big. Fucking. Whoop.
This idea you are tried to spread, that the administration recklessly fired a bunch of skilled, experienced, nuclear technicians that it's dangerous to be without is a fucking FANTASY. It's not true. It's what I said earlier: a <i>nothingburger.</i>
YAWN.
This is one of those non-problems that you lefties love to point to and scream about, and it's all a storm in a teacup. Even if that article is 100% accurate -- and the media has so destroyed its own credibility that I am not prepared to accept anything they publish uncritically any longer -- but even if it is. So what? The employees got rehired. Problem solved.
It's pretty standard practice in the business world, when trimming away fraud, waste and inefficiency, to trim and just keep trimming, until you've trimmed a little too much away, and then you <i>add back</i> what you need, so that what you finally end up with is a lean, efficient, streamlined workforce carrying no extra fat.
This is no different than an interview I saw on a Canadian news show after one of Musk's Starship rockets blue up. The guest, was a Canadian astronaut. The news presenter showed a clip of the rocket failing, and clearly was trying to make the point that this was terrible news for Musk, and clearly showed his company SpaceX was flailing, didn't it? Looks like these people don't know what they're doing; their rockets blow up. The astronaut looked at her with a noticeable "WTF" expression on his face and gently corrected her. No, this was absolutely ordinary, business as usual type stuff in the world of rocket development, and <i>always has been.</i> You test rockets, and during testing, you have lots of failures, and you sift through the wreckage after every one to find what went wrong, and you fix it. Next time that part of the rocket works reliably and you find the next problem. And in fact Musk has explicitly declared SpaceX embraces the "move fast and break things" mentality, which is a Silicon Valley mindset that encourages rapid experimentation and learning from failure.
So what you are pointing to triumphantly as some "gotcha!" example, is actually a big fat nothingburger.
Actually, it's a lesson in how to rescue one. Your side was on track to have us stop being the constitutional republic we've always been before the end of this century, and to turn into an oligarchy -- a kakistocracy really -- run by arrogant, entitled, unaccountable, transnational elitist snobs.
Dear God, how can you look at the record of the last administration and not realize what a horror show it was? And really, it was just the culmination of a trend that has been going for a long, long time now. Both the Democrats and the Republican establishment have been part of the problem for decades -- they've formed a ruling class that has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and skyrocketing debt, made life more expensive, taxed people to the gills, and talked down to the American people at every turn.
What we finally have is a populist, nationalist leader who, for all his faults, is at least attempting to turn us on a different course before we go over the cliff, and who is also attempting to cut away truly eye-watering levels of corruption that we are seeing brought to light.
What's the rush? I'll tell you what the rush is. The rush is to overwhelm both the political opposition, and the American legacy media (but there I go repeating myself). The rush is the need to come on hard and fast, and hit the Democrats with so <i>many</i> different things that they are knocked back on their heels, and have no idea where to focus their energy. Trump's opponents love to take anything he's done, put it in the headlines, then analyze it, spin it, distort it, attack it, try to turn public opinion against Trump on it -- that's easy to do when it's just one thing. How do they do that to a dozen? Two dozen? What should the NYT run on page one, Trump's nominee for SecDef, his promise to eliminate the Dept. of Education, or him laying of so many government workers? What do the Democrats in congress stand up and demagogue, his securing the border, Elon Musk and DOGE, or the pardon of the J6 defendants? What do Joe Scarborough and Rachel Maddow and all the other talking heads on cable complain about, Trump's proposed tariffs, Tom Homan and the ICE raids to round up and deport illegal aliens, or suspending all foreign aid until it can be reviewed on a case-by-case basis?
The rush is to discombobulate the opposition so they don't know what to do next. It's a political shock and awe campaign. And it's <i>working.</i>
In what way has democracy been dismantled? Are the next elections cancelled? Has the legislative branch been eliminated, or reduced to a mere rubber stamp that automatically approves whatever edicts Trump hands down? Do you no longer have representatives in your city or town council, and your state legislature? Has the governor in your state been renamed proconsul, and do his duties now consist of carrying out Trump's will? Yes, please do enlighten me as to what, specifically, has been done to dismantle democracy in the United States (not that our government ever was a democracy; it's a constitutional republic).
Because if you mean the work of DOGE, the attacks on the various agencies, the laying off of government workers, etc., I've got news for you: that's not <b>demo</b>cracy he's attacking, that's <b>bureau</b>cracy. And Trump was <i>right</i> to take an axe to it. It's gotten out of control, the amount of fraud waste and abuse that this out of control bureaucracy has been perpetrating, and which is coming to light, is simply mind-numbing. Moreover, the bureaucrats who run this swamp have come to regard themselves as beholden to no one.
Sorry, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's stupid. There's <i>nothing</i> wrong with going back to the original folklore. Quite the contrast, I'm glad he did. It's about damn time someone did. We've had more than enough of the other kind of vampire: the romantic, seductive, or tragic antihero vampire, or vampires as effete metrosexuals. In the original folklore, vampires were terrifying and utterly malevolent fiends. It's refreshing to see someone finally portray them that way again.
As for the complaint that this "isn't Nosferatu." Nonsense. It's just another way of depicting Count Orlok, and Robert Eggers is perfectly at liberty to do it. Just because a character becomes iconic portrayed a certain way doesn't mean that all subsequent versions of the character <i>have</i> to be depicted that way. Not all depictions of Frankenstein's monster <i>have</i> to look like Boris Karloff's version. Dracula doesn't always <i>have</i> be dressed in white tie and tails, with a red-lined opera cape, just because that's what Bela Lugosi's version looked like. By the same token, Orlok is under no requirement always to look like Max Schreck.
F.W. Murnau plagiarized the story anyway, so I think it's pretty rich to demand rigid adherence to his variant.
<blockquote>Secondly, Sargent's first year (the
show's sixth) is actually stronger than York's last.</blockquote>
Yeah, well, no surprise there. In fact it could hardly be otherwise. Dick York's back pain was so bad by that point he could barely work. Some episodes had to be written so that he was in bed or on the couch for all his screen time in those episodes, and he had to be written out of some episodes entirely with the disclaimer "Darrin's away on business."
Dick York was <i>much</i> better Darrin than Dick Sargent was. And I know Elizabeth Montgomery personally liked Sargent much better (York developed a serious crush on her and that made things awkward), but I don't think she had anything remotely like the on screen chemistry she had with York.
No, I was in Ireland at the time. A month later, I was in Munich, Germany, and on German television, there were all manner of documentaries and shows commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing -- not even a German achievement (well, not <i>directly</i> at least, Wernher von Braun and other German rocket scientists were heavily involved in the program), but one with incredible historical significance for all mankind, so no wonder they wanted to celebrate it. I called my mother back in the U.S. and asked idly if there was much on U.S. television marking the anniversary, and she said (in a rather exasperated tone of voice) "no, it's all O.J. Simpson. O.J., O.J., O.J., morning noon and night. That's all that's on television right now."
That was the first I heard of the whole thing.
<blockquote>Which party is it again that is banning books?</blockquote>
Neither. Removing age-inappropriate materials from <i>elementary school libraries</i> is not a ban. The books are still out there for everyone else's consumption. If they're your thing, knock yourself out; no one's stopping you from buying them. But some of these books don't belong in a school library anymore than video copies of "Debbie Does Dallas." Stop lying.
And please, the left is <i>all about</i> ideological conformity today. They <i>demand</i> it. Those who don't adopt the mandatory set of beliefs that all moral people <i>must</i> share get cancelled. Don't believe biological males belong in women's sports or women's prisons? <b>Cancelled!</b> Don't think we should deport illegal aliens? <b>Cancelled!</b> Want "drag queen story hour" kept out of your third-grader's school? <b>Cancelled!</b> Did you vote for Trump? <b>Cancelled!</b>
And spare me the nonsense about "artists" hating conformity. The entertainment industry is worse than any of them. That's why Disney fired Gina Carano for wrongthink. It's why actor Eric McCormack tweeted (about people in Hollywood attending a Trump fundraiser) "Hey, @THR, kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don’t wanna work with. Thx." It's why James Woods' agent dropped him when he began posting conservative comments on Twitter -- and there's no denying it was because of politics, because the agent wrote ""It's the 4th of July and I'm feeling patriotic. I don't want to represent you anymore..." It's why Bryan "Breaking Bad" Cranston publicly announced he ended a <i>decades-long</i> friendship because the friend voted for Trump. It's why tons of actors -- Stacey Dash, Antonio Sabato Jr., Morgan Brittany, et al. stopped getting work after they came out as conservatives.
So don't even <i>try</i> to tell me that "progressives" in entertainment don't cancel people.
View all replies >