I think you're right on both counts. I forgot about the latter, but it's justly commended. The nadir is undoubtedly "American Pie".

That's remarkable. You're right on both counts, but I kind of love that the earliest footage of him is in a Betty Boop tie-in.

No arguments better than those disputing musical genre :)

Ah, thanks for the correction. It's been a long time now since I read it.

Oh, that's fair. I guess it's just that even when they were calling themselves 'socialists' or 'democratic socialists' in the UK, most weren't advocating radically more than what you're describing. They were committed to a mixed economy in the Sixties while they were singing the Red Flag at party conferences. So…

Certainly was. I wish I'd done the same. It reminded me a lot of Into Great Silence, I guess unsurprisingly, but this one was so well done it felt like a documentary itself in the best way.

'Democratic socialist' was always dumb because it wrongly implied that socialism is normally anti-democratic, but that's what they used to call themselves. When they started calling themselves 'social democrats' the game was up. During their little party leadership debate last time they were all asked if they'd…

Charles II saved Christmas for realz.

Watched Des hommes et des dieux (2010). Grand Prix winner at Cannes that year. Excellent dramatization of the period leading up to the assassination of the Tibhirine monks during the Algerian Civil War in the mid Nineties.

There was an excellent, lengthy study by Dmitry Adamsky in The Journal of Strategic Studies a couple of years ago that detailed how the Reagan administration's insane provocations drove the Kremlin into such a state of anxiety that they almost perceived Able Archer '83 as the prelude to a nuclear first strike and…

Yeah, but they'd undergone their full neoliberal transformation by then. I'll feel equal schadenfreude watching the SNP slaughter Labour in a few months. Michael Foot was the last admirable Labour leader. Probably ever.

If a send-up, it was a pretty sophisticated one.

I have more appreciation for what you're indicating he was going for now, though.

It's interesting you were involved with that. And thanks for the link.

Oh, you're right. Looks different. Yeah, well. I'm not apologizing for shit. They probably lied about something else I don't know about.

Incidentally, user voting for albums and such like never came back. They lied. They lied right to our avatar faces.

I assumed it was him, but I'm a little ashamed I wasn't certain. Anyway, that seems like an enlightened opinion.

I thought surely you'd reveal the identity of your avatar for this purpose!

I haven't read any criticism or discussion of the show, so I'm unaware that what you're describing is a common opinion. Frankly, I'm a practising Catholic, but I find the antinatalism, and pessimism more broadly, that Cohle espoused pretty coherent and compelling. Coincidentally, I read Better Never to Have Been,…

Yes, maybe. I thought his musings at the end of the last episode were incongruous with everything that preceeded them and shouldn't have been just tacked on in that way. It wasn't as though that was his first brush with extreme violence or near-death experience, so it's unclear what the substantive basis of his…