431–440 of 514 posts
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Seinfeld wasn't at all well known in Italy when I lived there, but WTR was.
IIRC Seinfeld aired on Tele Montecarlo/La 7, while WTR aired on Italia 1, the difference in audience was massive.
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Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
Chuck Norris promising the USA will have 1,000 years of darkness if Obama wins in 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ae9b-B_EQ0
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As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail. Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period,…
The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
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Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted. The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing. There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safe…
How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a fundamental disconnect between how they are selected, how that power balance lies, and what their intended purpose is.
The House is supposed to represent the people. That's the job. Being answerable to their constituents makes sense. The Senate is supposed to represent the States - including as long-lasting entities that will exist before and after the current constituents. The legislature selected them because they were supposed to be more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the state, etc. They were to be tasked with doing the necessary thing and not necessarily the popular thing - people can always vote out the state legislature if the senators truly are hated, but having some insulation from the ever changing whims of the general public was a feature.
A lot of the rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric around the electoral college - preventing humans, which can be very dumb en masse, from doing dumb things. That has obviously not been the case, since unfaithful electors just haven't been a thing in quantities that have mattered, but I would argue that when we have found that things didn't work the way the founders intended, the correct option would generally be to make them work the way the founders intended and then only move away from that if we find that it doesn't work. Instead, we've frequently moved away from those things even when they were working.
Gerrymandering is an issue that doesn't have to exist either - it already doesn't in some states, and there's no reason it couldn't be implemented in all of them in this scenario where we're just wholesale changing how the government works.
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Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
In France, it was popular enough that everybody knew Texas ranger before the Chuck Norris jokes.
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How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades. The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a f…
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You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades. The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a f…
You’ll have to forgive me as a Black guy whose still living parents grew up in the segregated South and seeing that four of the southern states still consider “Confederacy Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine “Confederacy Day” with MLK day for not trusting the good will of the state governments - especially with gerrymandering.
But then if enough people in the overall country are bad actors you're back to square one.
I don't have any proposals on how to fix some people just deciding they want to be shitty people. But all of this discussion involves a significant amount of hand waving solutions into place - discussions on getting them implemented, the likelihood of that happening, etc., are all separate and not anything we've talked about from any of the positions.
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Shades of Piers Anthony's "On a Pale Horse," Death showed up to take Chuck Norris and Chuck killed him, taking his place.
I loved that series, until the last book. Maybe the novelty had worn off. It's been a long time since I read it, but didn't the current Death decide to retire and pass the role on?