FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get?
Nobody does that. /thread
Seriously, I don't understand how you think this is a dunk on the hypothetical person you're mad at. Your argument actually makes the safety standards seem very reasonable: they restrict only those tools of crime that are actually commonly used to commit crimes, and not those that are not commonly used to commit crimes even though they could be. The restrictions target the minimum reduction of liberty necessary to secure a large reduction in crime.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.
While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.
Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?
NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.
The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.
I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.
To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.
There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
So what defines Hardcore vs Casual here? It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.
Certainly in baseball, the fans who only watch the playoffs, or only watch games featuring A+ opponents, or only watch in years where the team is good, or will watch a game if it's on but won't watch every game those are the casual fans. Where the fans who watch every inning of every game, the guy who use to insist on driving the dump truck at work for afternoon games so he could listen on the radio, the fans who watch two sub .500 teams in August throw out their fifth starters with first pitch at 10:05pm. Those are the hardcore sickos.
Though less striking given the decline in audience for any primetime tv show. Used to be that primetime shows often hit 20 million viewers an episode, now they hit 5 million if they are lucky. So it's more like maybe a halving of their audience share relative to the secular trend.
2,000,000 is a pretty good audience. If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light. If an artist knew that 2,000,000 people would enjoy their art, they would make it.
This article, basically, but for TV.
There's no reason to expect the showrunners to operate on the timeline of taste, rather than the timeline of money.
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