I mean, it is partially the Air Force’s fault. Back in the old days, journalists were much more independent in how they covered the military. But one of the great innovations of the Bush-era forever war was to “embed” journalists in military units, where they could be safely guided toward the preferred narrative and…

In the 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré presents the “deep state” as a moneyed, cultured élite—the “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry, and commerce” whose access to information allows them to rule in secret. Trump’s conception is quite different. A real-estate baron, with the wealthiest…

That New Yorker article is legitimately very good (and the drinking game tidbit is just one paragraph). Good recommend!

One of the subthemes of the article is “a bunch of Trump policy people are also old Bush loyalists from back in the day”, which is how it’s ever been. The Bush loyalists were Reagan people, the Reagan people were Nixonites, the Nixon people were Goldwater boosters, on and on.

I mean, “you gave me bed bugs” could definitely be a viable, non-frivolous suit in many circumstances. But I’m assuming your building isn’t, like, a hotel or something.

I dunno, I feel like part of the reason we got multiple glimpses of Pink interacting with the other Diamonds was to preempt your theory. They didn’t listen to her or respect her opinion, so they wouldn’t have been willing to listen to her arguments for sparing Earth or willing to respect her autonomy to do so herself.…

In addition to streaming, I feel like another factor is the glut of TV nowadays compared to even ten or twenty years earlier. Streaming means less demand for reruns, like you say. But there’s so much TV out there, the supply has gotten way bigger. More supply + less demand means that production companies get a lower…

Or maybe she’s wishing to change her personal history, such that she died sometime in the distant past but then was resurrected again in the near past!

It works as just a straight up kids’ show (bright colors, exciting battle scenes) but it has a lot of layers. The character development is really strong and nuanced, there are really evocative themes and tight plotting, and it’s also just a coherent, interesting piece of science fiction about aliens colonizing Earth.

He…

I think there are a few different mechanisms for how this happens. First, if the discussion is happening in a public place (like a comments board), engaging a hardcore racist gives them a chance to present their ideas at length, and in the most engaging and rhetorically appealing fashion they can muster. That just…

Ammon Bundy is free because the US Attorney’s Office in Nevada is really shady and cuts a lot of legally required corners.

I think there’s a disconnect here between two ideas of discourse/respect. You’re arguing for a procedural definition, where “respect” is about how you engage with other people; tone, manners, following structured rules of argument, fairly considering the other side’s argument, etc. But most other people are arguing…

A lot of the things you say here are empirically false. For instance, most of the Constitution applies to non-citizens. In particular, the Bill of Rights only ever talks about “persons” or “people”, not “citizens”. So undocumented people still have rights to a fair trial, to due process, to not get shot by a…

Okay, I think I get what you’re saying now.

For me, the major difference is that nobody is out there talking about genociding Mormons or Scientologists. And they don’t face meaningful numbers of hate crimes, or government policies specifically targeted at hurting them (I guess maybe Mormons in China or something?). Whereas there is a ton of really grim rhetoric…

This is true as a matter of the dictionary definitions of those words, but I feel like in a broader sociological sense it’s not true. Americans (like Harris and I assume most people on this site) tend to view lots of things through the prism of race. To use another example, that’s clearly present in how we talk about…

That analogy got away from me there at the end, but you get what I’m saying

I think there’s a flaw in your reasoning, which is that it presumes that the audience for this stuff is only intellectuals. But that’s not true. Thousands (tens of thousands? not sure about newspaper circulation nowadays lol) of normal, non-intellectual people read the NYT opinion page and more or less uncritically…

I would go a step further and say that “intellectual” as a concept has always been kind of bullshit. Not that “intellectual” work is bullshit (coming up with ideas and propagating them throughout society are both very important). But “intellectual” as a noun, or a job-description. I think a lot of the time it serves…

UPDATE: I don’t think he quite predicted it, but he kind of foreshadows it in the episode where he gets obsessed with how snake-people are secretly running everything. After he rejects that theory, he decides that it’s actually the Great Diamond Authority that runs everything, and warns Steven that “they can take any…