I’m pretty amazed at the number of people in these comments who don’t get that when you have a party of any real size, any alcohol left anywhere in the kitchen that people might see it stands a chance of disappearing. It’s like they never went to college. The food is weird, though.

This is a false dichotomy, though. Sure meanings of cultural objects are indeterminate and up for negotiation, and that goes more for collaboratively-produced objects like a film. That doesn’t mean that any interpretation whatsoever has to have equal footing with all others. Some interpretations can just be glaringly…

LOL, you’re “being forced.” Forced. If only there were some way to not do this thing you don’t want to do. But no, you’re being totally victimized.

“I would ask that all members take it upon themselves to uphold the dignity of this institution. The whole world is watching us. I hope we can rise to the occasion,” concludes @GOPLeader.”

Um. Yeah, sure we did that, and maybe you heard about it. But what was that supposed to accomplish, again?

That is palpable, which means you can feel it.

I mostly starred this for your screen name. Funny comment too, though.

I’m far from a moderate and spend a lot of time pushing back on the idea that veering to the middle is the only way to build a coalition, even in my purple-to-red Midwestern-moving-toward-South state. But I still don’t understand this complaint.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made plenty of shit films too, and he is clearly the model Johnson is patterning his career after.

Nic Cage, Jennifer Lawrence, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlet Johansson, Angelina Jolie? This sounds like the take of someone who hasn’t seen many movies from before the 2010s. 

Huh. I actually took the rules as a critique of Kantian deontology. Everybody’s getting pinged because their actions are having negative butterfly effects on other people, violating the moral law not to do harm to others for self-benefit. But the law is being applied rigidly without any concern for intent, context, or…

But space on a interstellar scale (as opposed to intergalactic) isn’t so large that life couldn’t spread throughout it in a billion years or a few hundred million years, so if you presume life should already exist in our galaxy then there’s a mystery why we don’t see them.

Yeah, that’s why I said “the maneuvers ascribed to them.” I don’t think we saw them doing the craziest stuff the witness accounts say they do. But instantaneously jumping from hovering to several thousand miles an hour and moving that fast without producing any heat or exhaust are, ahem, light years ahead of anything…

Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

Yeah, I mean, I’m not saying these are aliens and I also don’t think it makes a lot of sense to speculate on the hypothetical motives of aliens, but it does make sense that if you were planning to do any kind of extended operation here for any purpose, you’d want to test the response capabilities of the most…

I think the difference is that all known experimental aircraft that were long rumored before emerging were using technology that was easily predictable as a near-future advancement but just hadn’t been engineered yet. If these are actually craft actually pulling the maneuvers ascribed to them, they are defying the…

it’s a mystery why our entire galaxy hasn’t been colonized and/or completely converted for resource and power collection.

They were common, but not standard, for people who had cellphones, which many people still didn’t. The cameras on those old Nokia or Samsung flip phones would also make a person sitting still in medium light from 10 feet away look like a grainy 1970s bigfoot photograph. I’m not saying what the dude said is real, but…

Except that IF it were aliens—I’m not saying it is, but if we are going to consider that as a possibility—we would have to allow for them to have traveled faster than light, which we currently understand to be physically impossible. To ask whether it could be aliens is fundamentally to ask whether what we understand…

Exactly, as far as I know it’s only science writers who talk with any certainty about the Fermi Paradox or the speed of light as an absolute. The default response of actual scientists to this kind of speculation is “well, impossible according to what we know, but what we know fundamentally changes sometimes, so who…