[Nepeta]

Most homeless aren’t crazy, or drug addicted, and yeah I have spent time in poor areas, REALLY poor areas, not “poor”. The actually poor areas where everybody “donates” plasma, and those people are skinny. There’s the big dividing line between the kind of poor we complain about getting welfare checks and REAL poor, actually poor people bleed for money, and the centers of America aren’t hurting for “donors”.

I believe statistics refute your assertions about the homeless.

I didn’t say the pollution in China was a result of prosperity, quite the opposite I was pointing it out as proof that the country hasn’t progressed as far as you’re claiming.

They have pollution in Beijing because enough Chinese can afford to buy CARS. How many privately owned cars were rolling around Beijing in 1963?

Outside the norm. Most folks liked it.

Most "folks" can be convinced to buy anything! They buy tap water in small plastic bottles! (I save fruit juice bottles, fill them half with tap water, freeze, and add water as needed. Cheap.)

Knowing the movie was good regardless of the reviews sounds like a religion to you? Try that one again.

It's akin to the way people worship Barack Obama. He's been a miserable failure, he's incompetent, he's anti-American, but the proles love him--as in a religion.

Actually Hubbard’s books sold well before he invented Scientology. He was one of the big dogs of SF.

Uh, no. I read sf in the 1960s and attended a lot of sf cons in the 1970s. I never ever heard anyone referring to Hubbard in the same breath as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Lovecraft, or any number of others.

Actually my bet is you decided you wouldn’t like it, watched it, and felt proud about how “right” you were. And now years later you’re still pissing and moaning about it.

I've already stated that I approached the movie with an open mind, and:

"I watched it, I didn't like it, and I decided why. I did not approach it with an attitude."

I assume you can read.

because even space TV shows don’t exist in a vacuum.

Star Trek existed only in reruns (and a weird animated version) from 1969 to 1977. You don't need to drag in things done 15, 20, 25 years later to awkwardly (and unconvincingly) make your point.

[discostu]

The stats http://www.huduser.org/Publications/pdf/ahar.pdf say there’s 643 thousand homeless people in America. That’s a lot. Then there’s the have a home poor, there’s plenty of extremely bad neighborhoods in this country that if you look at the housing the first thing you’ll think is they’d probably be better off homeless. Really poverty really still exists in thing country, and it always will. Life just doesn’t work out for some people, they don’t catch the breaks, they don’t know how to construct a good life from scratch, they’ve been in that situation so long the paper trail keeps them there (employers care a lot about your past, a long string of really bad jobs tends to make you only qualified for other really bad jobs). That’s the world I grew up in, and I still know people on that life track. Without a magic box there will always be the poor.

No they have pollution in Beijing because the government doesn’t give a crap. We have more cars than them and cleaner air. Remember the Chinese government has a doctrinal belief that there are too many Chinese, it’s why they instituted the one child policy. When your government thinks there are too many of you, they tend to not be into things like clean air and water.

No it’s not akin to anything Obama. I liked the movie. I like many movies the reviewers hate, and many they love. My opinion is not dependent on theirs. I just pointed out a simple fact that it was popular with the reviewers AND I liked it. No religion, no Obama, simple two facts.

Uh no, L Ron was a successful Golden Age pulp fiction writer, and was a fairly successful Hollywood script writer. You might not have heard of him back then, but that’s on you. I don’t like his stuff, but it was well regarded and popular. Which of course means nothing to you because you don’t care about popularity and reviews, but the facts are the facts and the facts are L Ron would still be known today without scientology, better known probably because we’d only know him for the writing not the cult.

You stated it, but I don’t believe you. You parrot all the usual stuff from the Trek heads who made up their mind before the movie came out.

No we DO need to drag in stuff that happened later because it informs the past. Because Coon died in 1973 we can look to TNG to see what TOS might have been like without him. We can look to things like the popularity of of stories with Klingons and Khan and see just how important Coon’s often overlooked contributions really were to the cultural phenomenon that is Trek. What happened later helps to illuminate what happened before. If my argument was that unconvincing you’d actually ADDRESS it instead of trying to poison its well.