I hear Barrett-style .50 cal rifles are great fun in the junkyard for pleasure shooters.

And it isn't really fair to call Sherman's approach "attritional", at least not in the traditional sense. His brand of attrition was aimed at severing civilian from military morale, not the direct man-killing approach that usually characterizes the American way of war. Ambitious American commanders have tried again…

My touchstone for auteurs who refuse the hero/villain duality character of TV narratives and get stuck with broken fanbases who lionize the most awful characters in their stories is Tomino & the first Mobile Suit Gundam. He tried to do ambiguous morality in a "real robot" mecha series, and ended up with generations…

While a signpost might be crucial to keep from being Lost, it doesn't make for a compelling hour of television. I tend to skip large sections of "The Moth" on rewatch - I just don't find junkies to be entertaining, whether they're lamely scamming people, or going through withdrawal, it's just uncomfortable, not…

It wasn't just Tom. The Others being "the good guys" was a pretty consistent party line from all of them until season four or later. It fits the basic rule of credible villainy: all men are heroes of their own story.

I thought I recognized that "set".

That's not true about Gettysburg. There was a major counter-offensive in northern Georgia several months after Gettysburg and Vicksburg where reinforcements from the ANV wrecked Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga, resulting in several months of semi-siege in front of Chattanooga. When Halleck…

Oh, damn, yeah, I didn't make the connection.

The series description sounded like an old British manor drama with all the class markers rubbed off, soapy as all hell, so I didn't ever give it a chance. Is it any good?

He sussed it out *because* he's a goofy intuitive fanboy who pays attention. Samaritan is inherently limited because of its Root-inflicted blind spot. Anyone who cares and is paying attention can notice the previous existence of the Man in the Suit and his sudden disappearance, and if they catch sight of "John…

What, aside from the visual reference to John Steed?

This season. I'm not sure if it's a sign of something we're supposed to pay attention to, an actual character development, or if somebody changed the series bible and the writers got spanked for switching loosely between "Reese" and "John" but always calling her "Shaw".

Check out Hayek's the Fatal Conceit. I've read elsewhere that Michael Oakenshott talks a lot about this same strain of philosophical anti-rationalism, but I haven't read him yet - I'm on the back third of Seeing Like A State right now, which is heavy enough slogging that I've been dipping in and out for the last…

By mid-season I don't, or should I say, shouldn't mean the mid-season finales, which the way this team structures their show effectively makes for two half-season arcs. There were some damn weak episodes last season between the first episode of S3 and when the HR finale started rolling. Episodes with too many…

Or, as we found out, he had recruited the guy in the first place and knew where to find him, along with a proper memory of the name on his bike. "Stress improves memory" is kind of laughable, given what we actually know about witness unreliability.

Nah, Greer and Team Machine are matter and anti-matter, put them in a room together, and you need a plot reason why everything doesn't explode. Which is a rule of good villainy I picked up from one of my favorite writers - she says that if your villain is at all credible, you need to either keep your villain and your…

Eh, probably depends on the Austrian. But I was using it in a technical sense - holding the idea that pure reason and calculation is not sufficient for economic analysis and action. It's known as the economic calculation problem.

Evil Lincoln, were you the one going through your telegraph office's timestamps, obscuring and adjusting them to blacken poor George's good name?

Sadly, these are real people - Joe Harsh, author of Taken at the Flood and Sounding the Shallows, and Timothy Reese, whose book has always been too damn expensive for me to afford, but of whose theory about Crampton's Gap being the strategic hinge of the Maryland Campaign I have read reams.

That complacency on the part of Greer will be what brings him down. He's failing to fill in the blind spots of Samaritan's panopticon if he just cedes all agency to his demon rather than engaging and questioning purposes and assumptions. By leaving everything to Samaritan, he's making himself, his implied role as a…