Well like I was saying before - for me it has nothing to do with her looks or her public persona (which, to be honest, I don't know much about) and everything to do with being generally underwhelmed by her performances. I really just don't think she's a particularly good actress.

Eh, I don't know about all that - for me, I just eventually realized that I'd seen several of her movies, and they're either pretty-good films that she doesn't really add much to (Moulin Rouge, The Hours, Rabbit Hole) or kinda-bad films where her performance is part of the badness (Stepford Wives, Fur). Then there's…

I really like 'Top of the Lake' but really dislike Nicole Kidman. I guess the positive and negative forces balance out and so: This news means nothing to me. What are we even talking about?

The key word is "part" as opposed to "all."

Aw, I hope mine do, because maybe if he ever wants to make another film about an alienated, delusional, sex-obsessed loner he'll think "Hmm, I know a guy…"

Honestly one of the things that creeps me out re: "The Man in the High Castle" is thinking about all the reactionary and "alt-right" types who see the show's depictions of a Nazi America and are like, "awesome!"

Rachel Maddow has been making a point of showing how Republican voters genuinely do like Trump, and actually have for some time; apparently he got more votes in the primaries than any other GOP candidate ever. I think this sort of information will be valuable for the future when, inevitably, GOP spokespeople claim…

It's true that the demographics are stacked against him - Romney won the white, male vote by a pretty big margin, but still lost the election; in order to win in the general, Trump would need either an almost-inconceivably huge victory amongst white men or he'd need to make big inroads with the groups that he's been…

On the NYC subway there are ads for Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle" with the text "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing." I saw one of these ads where someone had carefully blacked-out the I, H and S in "triumphs," so the ad now reads "Evil Trump when good men do nothing." Whoever did that gets a gold star.

Worth reading at times like this - George Saunders's PRKA Manifesto, from back in 2004: http://www.slate.com/articl…

Ugh sorry, that sucks. Some people just have zero empathy and see the rest of the world as a big collection of enemies.

You're right, I was clumsy with the specifics when I posted that first thing, but my overall point - that the Second Amendment can be argued as having more to do with military groups than with individual citizens - still applies.

Thank you. Anyway I'm sure people have moved on from this post, but just to quickly respond (and also, of course, between last night and now the U.S. had its worst mass shooting ever, which makes the discussion of gun control even more pertinent):
It's true that enacting practical gun control in the U.S. would be very…

I'm talking about the ways the Second Amendment is interpreted by modern-day Americans, and how this is actually not the same thing as what James Madison et. al. intended (there's a good New Yorker article that goes into some of this history: http://www.newyorker.com/ma… ). I think that the debate over the extents to…

Or another way to look at it: the Second Amendment was always meant to apply to military groups, not to individual citizens (hence the first four words, "A well regulated Militia"). The leap from "our country needs an armed military" to "every individual person should be able to have as many semi-automatic rifles as…

Also on the artsy music front: Tony Conrad (influential avant garde composer) and Richard Lyons (Negativland founder).

Also, toddlers are people. So when a toddler plays with their parent's gun and accidentally kills a family member, that's still a person killing another person, so see, it still counts.

Ugh… This reminds me of the death of 'Dimebag' Darrell (former Pantera guitarist) back in 2004 - it was really similar: a young guy with a gun came to his show and just started shooting. The guy was killed at the scene by police, but I think people basically figured out that he was schizophrenic and hearing what he…

When I saw the computer beat that guy at Go, I literally died.

And then of course, there's Maria Bamford's bit on Paula Deen: