What she has going for her is that nobody likes Cuomo. Upstate New York is littered with handmade signs by the side of the road demanding Cuomo fix the roads, or something less polite.

Not knowing what linguistic choices the filmmakers made, I can only point out here that Latin descended from proto-indoeuropean. A language that was spoken at the earliest about 7000 years ago (and one that also spawned English, Sanskrit, and Gaelic).

Ultimately I think the new Star Trek movies just don’t fit our current pop culture climate. They’re too far removed from their original inspiration to survive on that good will alone, and in a time when Marvel (for good or ill) basically sets the template, Star Trek just feels anticlimactic. They’re all decent movies,…

Possibly McCoy’s attire and beard in The Motion Picture.

That’s fine. They can take the money from elsewhere in the budget. A smaller scale would force them to be more creative and not rely on spectacle and cgi setpieces.

The tragedy of our monstrously stupid age is that we won’t get such a clean, and deserved punishment. The rich are almost entirely protected from the consequences of their actions, and the generation that fucked up our world the most won’t live to suffer through the results.

How so? Leftist policy treats humans as deserving equal dignity regardless of the capabilities of individuals.  
It’s the right that seems really keen on making distinctions between groups.

What’s interesting also is her horror at the idea of people thinking that the government could be used in such a way. It shows how conservatives ultimately are profoundly uncomfortable with democracy.

There’s another way the show has developed since those first few episodes; the focus has shifted a bit from how women suffer in a totalitarian patriarchy, to how women suffer at the hands of men who hate women, and specifically how Fred Waterford has revealed himself to be an absolute monster.
It’s not out of…

Yeah, but it’s fine to break Roman laws; they were godless liberals.

The problem is baked into the show; Atwood, essentially wrote, a chamber piece. Which works fine if you want to adapt it into a play, film, or mini series, but not as the set up for an open ended long running show.
So they’re forced to return things to that initial status quo in ever more forced circumstances.
As a form…

I’m looking forward to next week’s finale where he gives a three hour lecture on women and the chaos-principle from his attic stuffed with native American artifacts.

Personally, I’m fine with leaving Arrested Development as a perfect show that ended in 2006.

Well, I’m glad you have life all figured out. Please tell everyone how to avoid abusive relationships.
Hopefully it’ll keep you too busy to be a jerk online.

Life may be more free for Nick than for Serena (as free as working in a repressive state with informants everywhere can be), but I think that they both have this nagging feeling that what happens inside Gilead isn’t really the real world. That it’s all just made up rules and costumes.

I imagine that the Gileadeans gave them a list of protocols. It looks like Canada was very eager to normalise relations with the former US, a country that has nukes (and has probably used them recently). So giving into their delegation’s demands wouldn’t be too unlikely.

I kept wondering about Nick and Serena, and how being in Canada must have felt somewhat like waking up from a dream and stepping back into reality. All the trappings of Gilead, and the situation they’ve built, to some degree it has to feel like make belief. Walking around in that blue dress is one thing when everyone…

Which weirdly is one of the most unrealistic things about the Handmaid’s Tale. The most reactionary forces in America tend to adorn themselves to the brim with patriotic trappings.

Maybe at the time when Atwood wrote it, she could explain it as not exactly being rape, but we’ve moved on since then. It’s clear that the ritual amounts to rape.
You’re the one reducing the show to just being about rape. There’s a lot more going on. Just because it’s not some exploration of a made up infertility…

We really don’t know much about the aunts’ position in the hierarchy, in some ways they seem almost like they’ve got their own fiefdom apart from the commanders.
We don’t know how far Aunt Lydia’s word would go, mostly I think a denouncement from Lydia would just be grist for the mill of backstabbing and palace…