skullhair

So if I call up and say straight away, "I'd like to cancel my service. I'm not willing to give you a reason or be talked out of it or into anything else. I just want the service cancelled," would you comply with the request directly, or would you still make an attempt to talk me out of it once or twice?

If I were a customer, that would probably piss me off if I was absolutely clear I'm not going to be deterred and still had to restate it a couple more times.

You ever played the Portal games? He wrote Still Alive and Want You Gone.

He originally wrote it for Farley at Second City in Chicago. When they both went on to SNL, they took the character with them. Here's the sketch back then with Farley, Bob, Tim Meadows, and Jill Talley.

I recall hearing it explained on a making of documentary or commentary or two, but wikipedia goes into some detail of how the production came about. The executive producer acquired the rights to produce a film based on the French short, hired David and Janet Peoples to script it, and the producer brought in Terry to direct. It was the exec producer who wanted a film based on the short. Gilliam worked from the script.

I agree with the sentiment. I really do. It is, unfortunately, idealistic. Diplomacy is never so black and white in an interconnected global atmosphere that the United States has the option to tell all the brutal regimes and dictators to fuck off and make an enemy out of them. Sometimes, in the interest of our country, alliances have to be built with deplorable people at the cost of that country's own.

It's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. In the short term, if you make the country's authoritarian but stable leaders your uneasy allies, you may have access to resources, economic prospects, a host for military reach elsewhere it is needed, and save having to fight them.

In the long term, others suffer, and there is the potential for blowback if and when the power structure collapses. It's selfish, yes, but sometimes a necessary evil to maintain prosperity at home and relative stability. Brutal leaders are bad. Unpredictable warring power vacuums are worse.

That doesn't make the support morally right, but it is what it is.