The point is that rather than a rational approach to sentencing based on public safety and rehabilitation, the US literally hands down multiple life sentences to people with a single life span in order to satisfy some throwback Old Testament righteous anger.

First: It’s Tenacious D — embarrassing is a feature, not a bug.

Oh this was silly and delightful,  stop being so fucking cynical

America’s penal system: so appalling is makes convicted criminals sympathetic by comparison.

Jack White wrote and produced for and performed with Loretta Lynn.  He’s a country artist as well.

Didn’t know there was an earlier singer. I’ll have to check that out. I love listening to a band’s early work when they’ve yet to find their true voice.

Was there a better guitarist/frontman combo than Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar?

Saying he “ghostwrote” the song doesn’t seem accurate. He changed some chords on his solo. If he actually wrote Beat It he definitely would have claimed credit for it, since that songwriting credit alone that would have made him an incredible amount of money.

Nope, it sounds to me like someone struggling with depression and life and personal disappointments. 

One of the few concretely useful skills I learned in grad school was the ability to distinguish between clever arguments and genuinely good arguments. Like, yes, OK, great job playing with words, but it doesn’t really get at the substance of the issue.

Wait. The dude doesn’t bang the octopus? Well, this article just saved me ninety minutes of my life.

I do wonder what people actually want in this situation. Do they want her to be tortured and put into squalid conditions? I’ve noticed there’s this weird sort of thing in this country where we want to lower the bar rather than raise it. So if a bunch of people are treated like shit, and some are treated better, the…

I will point out the inherent hypocrisy in the fact that most of us at AV Club are probably left-leaning who believe in prison reform and change, and yet we all laugh at Aunt Becky going to a place wherein she (fortunately? Unfortunately, according to the tone of the article?) won’t be brutally assaulted,…

Is “look i’m chris rock lol” the same thing as “look i’m black lol” ?

I appreciate him saying that intention does matter. I’m not denying that people can cause harm even with good intentions, but saying intentions don’t matter opens the door to creating a narrative that is totally removed from the context of the allegedly offensive act.

“A lot of people want to say intention doesn’t matter, but it does.”

Eh, I don’t think it’s a false equivalency. You (and others) are attributing symptoms of a culture to a popular piece of entertainment. I don’t see how saying “violent video games influence violence” isn’t the same argument as saying “South Park influences alt-right radicalization”. I agree it has a Libertarian bent,…

Good. I’m glad someone finally said how corrupted our culture is due to this show. Now if only someone could point to the rise in gun violence and equate it to the popularity of violent video games, I think we’d be set. 

That tweet is truly a hot take that would make Helen Lovejoy proud!

The article (excerpt?) in the New Yorker last month was frankly pretty bad. It reads like a lazy wiki list of every time Hollywood used Wagner, and drops a few turds like the following takes, which I challenge you to read without envisioning a freshman delivering them between massive bong rips: