@ fuster:
possibly... since a) Scott's a pacifist, and b) many miles distant even from me.

This seemed very appropriate to Scott's other theme:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/of-gods-and-men.html

...and looks like a movie I'd have a hard time hating. The French make such great atheists, yet when they turn their eyes seriously on faith, they sometimes make very powerful films.

I coulda looked it up myself, I guess. I don't recall him or what he did. Anyway, can't hold him responsible for the movie around him - can we?

@ Scott Miller:
I'm missing something here. You make a very good point, worthy of a year- if not life-long discussion all of its own, but I couldn't figure out why he was bringing up the Matrix movies. Did Cornel West have something to do with them? I agree with Don Miguel - as on occasion I've been known to do, despite all - that Matrix 2 > Matrix 3, I felt by far at the time 3 came out, and after repeated viewings. I think that's all he meant, quoting Dante, that other trilogist. But I could be wrong. Or are you and Don Miguel in some kind of leapfrogging mode? (fuster?)

But as to West, he screwed himself up, his message-bearer potentials, when giving very petty, elitist-sounding examples of how he was slighted by BHO.

(exaggerations: obviously there must have been aspects of IT that I didn't hate "through and through," in every way all the time etc. And my poverty wasn't 3rd World poverty or homelessness or something... on the other hand, in my defense, my "family" concerns weren't strictly about starting a new one of my own...)

@ Scott Miller:
I strongly doubt that they could have co-existed. I also doubt the "never took it seriously" part as a whole truth. For instance, you can tell yourself you don't take it seriously for what it is, but you can take seriously how your wife or girlfriend would like you to spend your money, or whether the people you're working with are people you want to be with, or even whether there are all sorts of good things you could do with your unseriously gotten gains You would have had to "take it seriously" on some level to stay within "it," which also means letting it and even wanting it to devour you, to take you, seriously. If you're not in some essential way attached to whatever you're doing, then sheer Brownian motion will flow you away from it sooner or later.

It was simpler for me. I hated it through and through, but it seemed at times like my only chance of being able to rise out of poverty and become a semi-respectable person capable of having a family and things.

@ miguel cervantes:
Bill Gates, as I understand the story, simply stepped in when the people ahead of him in line got paranoid in a very countercultural No Cal way about IBM's (I think it was IBM's) confidentiality and secrecy measures. I'm not aware that he stole anything that wasn't "his" according to the rules of the game that he was stepping up to play. MS-DOS wasn't a wholly original concept, but there are no wholly original concepts.

@ Scott Miller:
I was thinking of a different writer, the one who wrote the MILLENNIUM script with the devils telling stories about how they tricked human beings.

Chris Carter sounds like a different syndrome. Joining brain damage to child abuse may have caused your idea to insert one level too deep for him to recognize fully its external origin or to resist stealing it to whatever extent he did recall that it wasn't his own. Kind of like INCEPTION... which I just watched on HBO, not having seen it before.

Is your whole career to be analyzed like an anti-dream dream, a series of steps symbolically disabusing you of every notion of the human moral validity, at least for you, of life in the "dream factory"?

They didn't need to do it because it was already the concept of every episode, I guess - which is why they could have done it. That writer whose X-Files episodes everyone liked so much probably could have gotten away with it. What was his name?

ER in space would be cool. Or MASH in space. "A motley group of happy-go-lucky humanoids treat casualties of interstellar warfare, and solve crimes."

Just read up on Sliders. I see that Slider-Doubles were, as I expected, a device they couldn't avoid - including at least one instance where no one, apparently even the writers, could be sure whether the character who had been killed was the "real original" or an indistinguishable "alernative." I also see what you mean about their jumping the shark along these lines in the finale, though it reads as a jump in the opposite direction, an alt-universe where Sliders wasn't just a tv show but the world religion or something. From within the "Sliders universe," that's the same thing. Sliders is already a universe defined by "Slidology."

@ Scott Miller:
I presume that at some point or another the Sliders traveled to alt-universes and encountered versions of themselves? If not, why not? Did they ever visit an alt-universe that was identical to our universe, down to the existence of identical Sliders, absent because simultaneously visiting our universe from the alt-universe? Were there evil anti-Slider Sliders?

Most terrifying of all would have been an alternative universe that was nearly identical to "our" universe in every respect, the only apparent difference (at first) being that in the alt-universe there were no real Sliders, but only a kinda cheesy TV show.

Maybe if I had seen an episode, I'd understand what Scott's suggesting about MST3K. Isn't the idea that the dudes are somehow visiting alternative universes? Wasn't there some kind of vehicle or machine or portal or something they employed to get from here to there? Are you saying, Scott, that it would have been useful if someone in "our reality" could actively observe what was going on in the other reality? Calling it an MST3K thing might point to the way that the Sliders concept, like all alternative reality narratives, on some level, however rigorously suppressed in favor of other narrative values, is or ought to be highly self-referential - a meta-narrative, stories about making up stories...

Anyway, I was trying to get a theoretical issue. The problems that the physicists run up against are on some level the same ones that creative writers have to resolve, or pretend to resolve. Scott's story about how his stories got him thrown off the show suggests the final displaced absolute convergence of reality and alternative reality, the oncoming inevitable collapse of alternativity into only the same, framed as his ejection from the world of making up stories to a second life that I also want to fit into the framework somehow.

@ miguel cervantes:
This book attempted to analyze various time travel concepts, some taken from science fiction, in terms of theoretical physics: The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics

As I recall, the author and his physicists were quite skeptical about most time travel concepts, but were able to carve out an exception contingent essentially on the time traveler never - very literally never - having any effect whatsoever on the present (as I recall he'd have to intercept some time-like spiral on the far other side of conceivable space-time or something). As the author points out, the idea roughly coincides with the rules governing a certain sub-genre of time travel and alternative universe fiction, where, classically, the story develops in the direction of effective convergence with "real" reality or the unaltered time line, in some tragic or at least ironic way.

Without ever having watched an entire episode of SLIDERS, I have to guess that, at the very least unconsciously, and probably quite consciously in other respects, this "convergence rule" sooner or later governed plot and theme, especially where resisted: The "sliders" themselves could only have been agents of symbolic convergence, for the same reason that every setting and every development had to begin with and be defined by its divergences.

@ Scott Miller:
There was what seemed to me a wise statement in the foreword to a very dark book about WWII, where one old general at a reunion long after the events was quoted as saying to another old general "if only we knew then what we know now," and the second one replies, "oh, no, we would have done much, much worse." Or some such. Neither implicit assumption can possibly be correct, just as it's obviously impossible to know earlier what you come to know later, because the real knowing is inseparable from the not having known, and couldn't have arisen in any other way. But we keep on trying to see things in isolation, or to imagine that our reductions of knowledge could be the same as the actual knowledge won in all its complexity from resistant greater complexities, and could therefore be delivered to the past with sufficient effect - as though if only "we" could have read the right book, or skipped the wrong one, we might have by-passed whatever catastrophe, Iraq or the Econocalypse or whatever seemingly entirely unrelated parallel personal microcosms.

So you had to be naive not just to feel the way you did, but to know now what, if you could have known it before, you would never have to come to know at all.

!

...but my larger point is that taking the cure, and heading consequentially in the general direction of Carpenter and/or Miller, looks like it will come at cost, slow or fast, not on credit.

@ Scott Miller:
No, not nostalgia for Bush's policies, nor for Bush-Rove politics as we came to understand them in retrospect, but nostalgia for the naivete that characterized the entire Clinton-Bush era, and also for a Republican conservatism that for whatever reasons and however incoherently sought to incorporate the other side's ideas and interests in its own rhetoric and program.

Chait and Bernstein thoroughly dismantled a similar parallel being pushed by Jay Cost, if thankfully with more economy of expression than managed by the ever voluble Mead.

Specifically on the weak comparison to Carter, Bernstein produces some numbers:

As of yesterday, Obama was at 47% per Gallup, a tick or so higher according to Pollster's average. That's not a number that predicts a landslide reelection -- but it's also not one that indicates deep trouble. It's nothing like where Jimmy Carter was in July 1979, when he delivered the "malaise" speech -- Carter had fallen below 30% in June 1979, and stayed there fall into the fall.

Links to Chait and Cost can be found in Bernstein's piece:

http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/06/catch-of-day_16.html

I won't say that Mead's article is nonsense, but I wouldn't call it persuasive either. The one point he makes that rises, I think, a little above the norm is that the public might be persuaded not merely that Obama/Hoover has failed on the economy, but that he has no idea how to be successful. To exploit that possible perception, the Rs will need a minimally persuasive argument - which is different from a claim - that they might possess such an idea. The poll numbers cited as well as the evidence that the public still holds Bush more responsible for our "fix" than Obama suggest that whatever Obama's problems are, they're not at Carter-Hoover levels.