The casual cruelty of the strip [fully intended, I think] is generally an asset in satirizing corporate America, but also makes it impossible to get invested in any of the characters, and makes the thing unreadable when it ventures outside of the office. It also shows makes it unsurprising that it's written by…

I mean it's pretty hacky overall, but has some very on-point satire about the idiocy of the corporate world. Not the most difficult target, I grant you, but it rings very true for anyone who's had the misfortune of working for a big company.

only a lunatic would have risked death and dismemberment at the hands of the best hired muscle corporate America could buy, just to recruit truck drivers for ten dollars a pop. The movie beautifully captured how the qualities that served him so well in the depths of the depression became a liability in the relative…

I know this is incredibly late, but Hoffa just got added to Netflix and saw it for the first time in years. I don't think it glamorizes him (as Bugsy idiotically does), so much as tell the story from his point of view. It shows the violence of the labor struggle, and the hypocrisy of the Kennedys who condemned him…

Well, most of their fans were kids only allowed to listen to Christian music. Once those kids went to college or the Marines, it didn't stand a chance. So it's not like garden state where it suddenly became uncool.

I mean their guitarist was pretty good, and I say that as someone who first started learning at the height of creed's popularity. but he's not good enough to override the horror that was Scott Stapp, as both singer and lyricist.

Balls out II: Electric Ballsaloo

Dar isn't stupid, he's just trying to avoid bad press for the agency. The CIA is just as much rife with careerism and ass-covering as any major institution. At the beginning of the 80's, they fired a bunch of their top analysts for failing to come to the predetermined conclusion that the USSR was massively on the…

I like how they set him up as an analog to the store owner who said that he was a good German citizen and got shafted. He was a good IS terrorist! Where does playing by the rules get you in life?

Yeah, they didn't even give her the proper strawman argument of "we sacrificed our civil liberties and we're not any safer."

All they need is a similar lack of knowledge about pop culture, and they'd be solidly in bill Simmons' target audience.

Yeah, and that mishmash of teutonic tribes nonetheless constituted a common language, culture and geography. Even though they didn't exist as a modern nation state, they did shit like defeat the Roman legions, that a modern day German might well be proud of. No such legacy exists for the American south.

Germany had thousands of years of heritage predating the Third Reich. Including some great military victories if you want to celebrate that sort of thing. Not to at all defend the Confederacy, but it's the unique link to the past of the American South, so there's at least an argument that the flag has a connotation…

According to the Satanic theories of Charles Darwin, they do not

Well to be fair, jihadists took - what - half of Syria and a third of Iraq? Much better then they'll do in Germany. It's not terrible advice.

Thanks, Bob, this X1000. As much as it was unfair for him to be blacklisted, it's disingenuous to portray him as some kind of moderate leftist who was branded a commie by overzealous right wingers.

Don't forget the unsolicited assurances that he doesn't like the Eagles. He's too hip for that, you see.

Well that's what I can't stand about him. He's pioneered an entire field of worthless pop culture analysis that isn't tongue in cheek enough to be funny, but is far too surface level to provide any true insight. He remedies that with lazy contrarianism, false binaries and cute parallelisms to trick you into thinking…

It means Chuck Klostermann thinks it's super-secretly sneakily quietly underratedly super-offensive if you really think about it.

I still think SoaD is better than Korn and everyone else, but man, their music does not age well. I heard BYoB recently, and that might be the worst protest song of the whole pathetic Bush era protest song catalog.