Even if that’s true, you obviously can’t defend Trump’s executive order as rational policy on those grounds. I mean, what are Trump supporters suggesting here?

There’s a lot of antipathy toward the media these days, not all of it unjustified. In principle, that shouldn’t prevent us from seeing that Trump’s attitude toward the media is a big problem. But I don’t expect many people to be eager to stick up for Buzzfeed or CNN. (Hell, consider the website we’re on right now and…

Okay, what percentage of the workforce do you think people like that comprise? Does it make sense to design major infrastructure around them?

Does she have anything to lose? My sense is that she’s finished otherwise, not just in the sense of losing the presidency—she’s finished in politics, period. On the other hand, you might think that the backlash against the democrats as a party is still worth worrying about.

Yeah, I keep hearing that the cultural resentments we’re seeing are just a byproduct of economic anxiety, but it sure seems like there are plenty of people who only voted for Trump on the basis of one or the other. I don’t expect that most of the 4chan or Reddit users who gleefully “memed” Trump into office are…

That’s a tenuous inference, particularly in an an election as close as this. If the presidency were simply determined by the popular vote, then campaign strategies would shift to reflect that, so we can’t assume that Hillary would win the most votes in that scenario

ME2 is my all time favorite, so I’m committed to playing Andromeda, but this trailer makes the game look about as generic as it could possibly be.

I would be surprised if that were really the case. Where do you live? You realize that the formulation you’re suggesting is trivial—that is, unless you think it plausible that drivers might otherwise have the right to plow into crossing pedestrians. The law in question is completely pointless unless a pedestrian…

On the whole I agree with you, but at the same time there is an asymmetry between the left and right when it comes to terrorism that lends credence to the possibility of a false flag here. There have been many acts of violence perpetrated or attempted by right-wing terrorists (e.g. the 2015 Planned Parenthood…

There may be reasons to think that expulsion was too extreme a punishment in this case, but the idea that “legitimate reasons for expulsion” simply has the same extension as “illegal” is clearly a loser.

I don’t, no. Even if Ichiro is in fact generally unwilling to speak English—and everything I’ve read indicates that he just prefers an interpreter for interviews in order ensure precise communication—there’s no reason to think that’s he’s harming anyone by doing so.

That is not a safe assumption at all. Most suicides are impulsive, not the result of deliberate long-term planning. That is one reason why measures like suicide nets on bridges have been effective in many cities, even though skeptics initially claimed that people would just kill themselves some other way.

Zemo has no powers, but he’s also utterly generic, at least as he is presented in “Civil War.” (I don’t read comics—if he’s more interesting in the source material I wouldn’t know). What is there to his character except an thoroughly cliché revenge backstory?

People keep pushing Deadpool as an antidote to the ubiquitous superhero flick, but I’m not seeing it. Yeah, he breaks the fourth wall, but it doesn’t really strike me as different in kind from the cheekiness of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man or Joss Whedon’s Avengers (which is full of meta-flavored humor). Mostly the…

>Literally using your logic here the exact same reasoning could justify excluding black males from stadiums.

It’s often remarked that turf takes a similar toll on baseball players (for example, I’ve seen writers claim that playing on the Expos’ artificial turf ruined Vladimir Guerrero’s knees). This always kind of puzzled me, since outfielders, and baseball players in general, run very little in the scheme of things.

I’m not outraged by this sort of thing. If anything, I think that calling something as dumb as this disturbing gives it too much credit. I’m bemused by the idea that game sequences like this are a good way to “convey” a “message,” though. Are there really people who think this stuff is morally enlightening to anyone?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it were on the level of Abrams’ first Star Trek movie—high production values, good action, but in the end a mostly generic flick. I don’t expect much more, and I’d guess that most fans would be more than happy with that. Moreover, the fact that Abrams seems to be rehashing material from the…

>> You wouldn’t call yourself a basketball player if you played in a rec league.

Unless you think that practically every other first world country has drastically lower incidences of mental illness than the United States, this is not a remotely convincing explanation.