Jul
31
2026

"You Cut Off One Person's Toes, and Suddenly That's Your Thing."

A bit of brilliance from Frank J., succeeding on both a technical and (for me) an ideological level:

On a related note (really), Jeff Maurer wonders: Directors Hate AI. What About Bottom-Feeding Comedy Writers?. The directors mentioned: Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro, and probably lots of others. But:

I would never, ever threaten the beauty and redeeming power of art. Anyone who reads this blog knows that protecting the beauty and redeeming power of art is priority A-1. Priority A-2 is for me to make enough money to die under a whiskey-soaked pile of prostitutes, but priority A-1 is unquestionably the art thing. That being said: It occurs to me that some directors who forswear AI — in any context, ever, even just for one shot — and say “I don’t care what it costs” typically direct movies that already have nine-figure budgets.

But what about those of us at the opposite end of the entertainment spectrum? And I mean the extreme opposite end — the part of the spectrum looked down on by people who make snuff porn and terrorist training videos. I speak, of course, of TV comedy. It’s been a rough decade for TV comedy. The switch to streaming kneecapped late night TV and sitcoms, we’ve lost market share to reality TV, and people get their comedy for free on social media. These structural factors have been devastating — so devastating, in fact, that writers like me can tell a convincing story of why comedy died without mentioning that we have also mostly produced boring garbage that most people wouldn’t watch on a dare.

Well, it's not just TV comedy, but also the sort of stuff Frank J. does, on a budget that (I would imagine) is in the micro-Odyssey range. How many wannabe auteurs are out there right now producing their masterpieces without having to pay off members of SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, WGA, DGA, and the Teamsters?

This is probably going to happen quickly. There will be screams.

Also of note:

  • But we didn't listen. Kevin D. Williamson says we're heading into The Democracy They Warned Us About. Specifically:

    The Democratic Socialists of America, an insurgency within the Democratic Party, is having a moment, and it is showing us something worth noticing: This is the democracy John Adams warned us about.

    Given the record of socialism in power, critics of the DSA and what it stands for are justified in suspecting that these radicals are not actually all that serious about the democratic part of democratic socialism, that the word “Democratic” in the faction’s name is no more meaningful than in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But the thing to be feared here is the opposite: They are extremely serious about the democratic part and will strip Americans of their rights, liberty, and property in the name of—and with the aid of—democracy.

    Democracy is the oxygen of the American political atmosphere, and as in the physical atmosphere, you only want a little bit of that oxygen—too much oxygen in the mix and the political metaphors start to write themselves: People develop tunnel vision, the central nervous system breaks down, tiny sparks turn into explosions and conflagrations, and the thing we cannot do without becomes the thing that kills us. Sola dosis facit venenum, advises the old physician Paracelsus: It is the dose that makes the poison.

    Apologies, I'm out of Dispatch gifted links for July. Subscribe.

  • Can you stand one more Fauci link? Sure you can, bunkie, when it's from Jonathan Turley: The Sound of Silence: Fauci Takes the Fifth and the Heat Over his Diary Disclosures. And my state's soon-to-be-senior Senator makes a cameo:

    “Stick with the science and never veer from that, even when the science turns out to be an inconvenient truth for somebody.” Dr. Anthony Fauci delivered those words to Georgetown students in 2017 as the touchstone of medical ethics. Today, before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, that line was replaced by Fauci in repeating “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

    The optics could not have been worse, but what you saw depended largely on how you viewed the hearing. For critics, Fauci sounded like Crazy Joe Gallo without the sunglasses.  For supporters, Fauci is still a hero who refused to fall into a trap laid out before him. Democratic senators such as Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) actually praised Fauci for refusing to answer questions before Congress.

    And you can watch Senator Maggie's performance for yourself:

    Six minutes and fifty seconds. While making it clear she would rather not talk, or even think, about what Fauci did and said back then.