This series had a massive effect on me growing up as well. While the politics are spot-on, the blind rage and accusatory tone of this post don’t comport at all with the friendly, forgiving tone taken in the books. I like Coville’s approach better.

Holy shit. I was just randomly telling a friend—completely unprompted—about this series and the drastic effect I’m slowly realizing it (and another Coville series, Aliens Ate My Homework) had on my worldview. He sent me here. Guess we’re not all such unique snowflakes after all.

This actually explains a lot about the insufferable “dirtbag left” podcast the author has been running for the past year.

They do. Explicitly. Which might be why we’ve all been retching so much lately.

It’s for the kind of people who hear Jeff Zucker’s pitch to have CNN cover politics like a sporting event and don’t immediately start retching in disgust.

I’m not sure I agree with David Frum on, well, anything. But I think this streak of political puritanism is dangerous as hell, and is one of the major reasons we ended up in our current clusterfuck. Successful politicking depends on finding common cause and building coalitions, even if some of your prospective allies…

I like politics. I care about politics. I annoy my friends constantly with my opinions about politics. I still wouldn’t be caught dead within 50 miles of this thing.

I actually do watch All In with Chris Hayes somewhat religiously (and sometimes even tweet at the same time!), and Politicon still sounds like the stupidest thing on earth to me.

This sounds awful. Sell that thing and tell the in-laws that they can come visit you if they want to see their precious grandkid.

I mean, she had a regular gig writing opinion pieces with the New York Times during last year’s election cycle.

Thank you. I’m appalled by how many ostensibly smart people are peddling this garbage today. You can acknowledge that two bad things are distinct and not support either.

Wait, Barstool has a professional UI/UX person? What do they do all day?

It is. They realized instead of trying to stomp it out—which you can never completely achieve—they could just take a cut of the profits instead. It actually works out pretty well; you can only buy so much progression with gold, but you can skip a lot of stupid shit like farming if you have a day job and just want to…

I’m not sure any of those historical figures are worse than Trump. They just happened to be in less constrained positions of power. God knows how many people Trump would have tortured and killed if he could get away with it.

Stupid people have agency. Just because he’s too stupid to appreciate how little he understands about governance doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for the consequences of his terrible decisions.

No, I am. I just think pro athletes are adults, and can make their own decisions about the acceptable level of risk to accept for a shot at that sort of lifestyle.

Eh, it’s human nature to root for the locally-connected guys, even if you objectively hate them. No one in Boston can stand Mark Walhberg or Ben Affleck, but we’re still kind of proud that local guys are doing so well on the world stage.

As a Patriots fan, this was my verbatim reaction. Not that this will lead to anything. Brady knows what he’s doing and can take care of himself.

I’d argue that it’s important for press access to be available, even if it’s almost never used for anything good.

There’s a difference between defending the conduct and pointing out that someone made a very stupid comment about it.