I'd say the Helots were probably worse off than slaves in the Americas, but it's a tough call. I had a different understanding of Crypteia, but no less awful (I think of it as more akin to the Ku Klux Klan or Brownshirts—roving toughs inflicting terror on the populace for a mix of politically repressive and racial…

Yeah, my favorite thing about that last bit is that the Athenians were notably more influential in both of the Persian invasions. The action at Thermopylae was important as a holding action, but the Athenians (who comprised nearly an absolute majority of the Allied navy and were by far the largest fleet) fought an…

Tywin was feared and respected in the Westerlands, but not liked. He was hated in much of the rest of the Seven Kingdoms by the time of his death, including Dorne, the Riverlands and the North. The Reach was okay with him, but then his daughter royally fucked them over (no pun intended), so their objection, if…

As we get farther from the generations' lived experiences, it becomes harder to really grasp what they were like without serious historical study. The Lost Generation was weirder than most of the generations that followed it in every direction. There were more communes in the '20s in America than in the '60s, but…

Don't forget that if you're a grey and you reply to an ungreyed comment, your grey comment gets stuffed into a basket at the bottom of the "thread" (scare quotes because there's only one level of threading) that people have to click into after scrolling past all non-grey comments. You're basically muzzled.

True, though this makes more sense for guys like Trey Hollingsworth (district is R+13, and thus presumably ripe for primary challenges since the general is a foregone conclusion) than Stefanik (district is R+4, and covers a lot of declining factory towns).

So long and thanks for all the Simpsons references.

Hey man, as someone who has also been here a long time (this is like my fifteenth account because I forget log-in information and switch computers), I just wanted to say it's been fun sharing the same internet clubhouse as you for a while. If you make the transition, keep on low-key trolling the GoT (Newbies)…

I was confused about why I got a Community Is Dead notification for this but I'm actually good with it now.

I used to comment on the Gawker sites. They are sewer people who make rotted human offal shine by comparison.

Racism, probably.

Wait, this is important: are A.V. Club articles going to be "suggested" or whatever on Gawkerverse sites and vice versa? Because that's a little like starting a 16 gauge IV of raw sewage into the veins of the commenting community here, and would cause me to stop visiting the A.V. Club completely, as I previously fled…

As a hardcore liberal, I am also deeply concerned by this. I stopped going to the Gawker sites when they started moderating everything like some kind of laughably ineffectual 20-teens campus liberal version of the NKVD.

Will the A.V. Club adopt the Gawker-verse's ridiculously censorious system of "greys" and acknowledged commenters?

I said this in an earlier AV Club article on intergenerational warfare, but as a Millennial, I've never felt any animus towards Gen-Xers. You guys are like our older siblings. Hell, some of my older siblings are Gen X. I hope to god that this whole generation naming and shaming horseshit finally dies with the…

All true, but it doesn't explain entirely why there aren't more Millennial Democratic Representatives. The cities could be electing young, PoC Reps, but largely are not. Even a guy like Hakeem Jeffries, just elected in 2016 and representing NY8 (a chunk of central and western Brooklyn that has a lot of young, urban…

Trust me as an older Millennial: our nihilism has nothing on Gen-Xer nihilism.

Millennials are killing fax and voicemail!!!!!!!!!

Depends on which segment of the Millennial generation you're talking about. I feel like as an older Millennial (34), people my age are probably on average among the best with computers, because we started using them before they got polished but after they became accessible. The best programmers are probably a little…

In my view, the only meaningful definition of Millennial are those of us for whom 9/11 was a defining moment of childhood/young adulthood. The all-volunteer nature of our armed forces prevented the wars that followed from defining us the way that Vietnam, Korea and WWII helped define the Boomers, Silents and…