Um, do you realize that you are advocating retreating into a safe space bubble where ideas that don't reinforce your preconceptions are simply ignored rather than considered? I feel like that's becoming a significant factor in the downfall of civility and reason.

I would ask you...ARE you boring? If not, you must admit that the preconception you expect from others is in error, and I hope you might think it through to see your preconceptions about them may be erroneous as well.
I still talk to strangers all the time, because I already know what people in my bubble think....just hearing my own thoughts and assumptions repeated with no critical analysis...now THAT'S boring.

Too funny - Anthony Weiner dick picks will be Hillary's downfall for the election.

Ah The company you keep.

Um, it's more like taking a little from <5% to improve the lives of all 100%, so off the bat 'Regan' is lying. Having a 'bottom' 15% living well below poverty levels creates a climate that's good for no one, including those at the top. Creating a 'safety net' for those people creates a society with less crime and more opportunity for all, and wastes less money on policing, prosecuting, and incarceration, as well as less production lost. Yes, there will be a few who 'take advantage' of the programs to loaf, but there will be more who take advantage of the programs to succeed where they had no opportunity to do so without them.
The classroom play was also ridiculous. Socialism would mean that they all got the education they needed to preform on the test, including the classroom materials and tutoring if needed, capitalism would mean those who inherit books and can afford classroom materials and teachers get to 'learn', those who can't afford them only get to 'learn' by osmosis if they're allowed to participate at all, never learn directly, so only the truly exceptionally gifted might 'learn' while the rest sit in the corner getting dumber. (in their analogy, 'learning' is analogous to 'succeeding financially')
In this ridiculous classroom fantasy, they offer an extreme version of the downfalls of pure socialism, but absolutely none of the benefits, then show how that system doesn't work.
Because of this disingenuous one sided portrayal of the system it's claiming to explain, I dub this *lies.

Oh god, downfall videos were MADE for this. It makes me uncomfortable how much I laughed at the casual antisemitism

Considering the dick-waiving that the whole Star Trek vs Star Wars thing always devolves into, I actually enjoyed the light-heartedness of this skit.

That said, the purpose of the stories told by each is meant to be completely different. That Star Wars goes for the simpler, classic hero's journey doesn't make it a lesser work, it just has a more singular focus, and the original trilogy did it well. But when you have a strong foundation like that, you really can't expand on it without losing a lot of the charm of the basic story. That's part of why the sequels were so disappointing. They couldn't retell the hero's journey without being a rehash, and by focusing on the hero's downfall, they had to up the complexity of the plot. But how complex can you make a plot before it just drags the movie down? (The exception was Clone Wars, which was able to circumvent this because it had more space to tell the story.)

This is why I am fairly certain that the new Star Wars movies will be lacking. They can either go the simple route and end up with a rehash, or the complex route, and end up with a similar mess to the prequels. There's a fine line they need to ride in order to make a good set of movies, but there are a lot of things working against them, from the expectations of the Star Wars fans, to the concessions writers have to make to appeal to the mass audience of modern movies. (To say nothing of Abrams, whose insultingly abysmal treatment of Star Trek gives me little confidence.)

Now on the Star Trek end, the stories are meant to be more complex, with commentaries on philosophy, modern politics, and the human condition (as well as showing the unique technological possibilities that the future held). Most of the stories were designed for introspection, and that's a major part of what made the show popular.

But if you lose that introspection and focus on action and special effects, the stories become empty. This is why many of the later movies, which again had to focus on mass appeal, were so lacking. (Movies like Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, Generations, and First Contact avoided this because they were able to draw on the richness of the show to round out the themes they were trying to express, but even still, they weren't quite up to par to the shows when it came to the fundamental concepts of Star Trek.) The same goes for much of Voyager and Enterprise, which often ended up going more for appeal than intellect. (Perhaps the writers ran out of things to say, perhaps the audience just got dumber, who knows.)

So in the end, which one is nerdier? Star Trek, hands down, and as ChaosEngine said, it's a good thing.

Which one is better? That depends on what kind of story you're looking for.

But in the end, there's no denying . . .


Riker is a freaking boss.

@NaMeCaF I'm not trolling; the video is shit. It's boring, it's unoriginal and it's wrong. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way, right?

And yeah @GenjiKilpatrick, Bruno Ganz was amazing in Downfall, so at least the scene actually works. This just sucks.

Get the large money out and bring back free government.
Until people start minding whats going on nothing will change except the continued downfall of the USA.

If ever there was a time when we needed the great "Hitch" it is surely now!
A time when crazed barbarians are trying to drag us back from enlightenment into medieval, theocratic subservience. He would be telling all who would listen that we ignore this clear and present danger at our peril, and that trying to placate with logical discourse those whose intent is clear, will end in our downfall.

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I watched it carefully. His arm moves very fast for a dying man. Keep in mind, I think they set the tone of Oberyn's amazing speed and reaction time when they first introduced him and he nailed that guard's hand to the table. So I would have liked them to persist with that (as in, fast as the Mountain was he would still be too slow)

Being run through with a huge bladed spear twice will inflict massive trauma to a very vascular region, creating immediate blood loss and very quick hypovolaemic shock. I agree that you can keep going until your blood pressure is low enough to knock you down (I was a paramedic - that's bread and butter stuff for me). But he already fell down involuntarily. If he made a massive adrenaline fueled exertion after that I expect to see rainbows of blood coming out of the Mountain (for the viewers pleasure of course) and for you to be slower (you've got blood loss! - which doesn't speed you up).

As I wrote I haven't read the books, so a lot of the nuances will be lost on me (and other unenlighted).

I would have dropped the emotion and instead pushed the cockiness of Oberyn and let that be his downfall (and you could have almost the exact same ending).

I understand in the book the Mountain is like 8 feet tall. This would have helped with the skull popping effect (which is not possible by even the strongest men in our world). And it would have made it look cool with a veritable giant next to Oberyn.

Yep. What about if the cop had been Hispanic or black? It's no mystery that the inordinate amount of prisoners in the US are in the system due to profiling just as it's no mystery that by design, a socio-economic disparity and fear of incarceration has been institutionalized in our culture.

What, 50 years after Brown vs. BOE the violence and ignorance bred into our culture has neighborhoods, schools once again either 95% white, black, or Hispanic???

This is all by design....funny thing is you couldn't have said this about 25 years ago but it's glaringly obvious now isn't it??

America is so fucked and the goddamned media and public education is the mechanism of our downfall. We are breeding some of the most socially functionally retarded humans on the planet....

I just hope they don't team up with those crows to plot our downfall.