Closest analogue I can think of is the subplot in Love Actually where the guy who’s a complete goober in Britain thinks that if he moves to America, gorgeous women will start throwing themselves at him based on his accent alone... and then as soon as he arrives, that EXACT thing happens. It’s a riot.

This is a very good and true point about asset forfeiture laws more generally, but the problem with those is that they’re used as improper leverage over criminal defendants. This specific shark-fin case wasn’t criminal - the dispute was over civil penalties that the government assessed on the shipowners. That’s the…

I think Shawn is going after the humans so hard because they’re a huge threat to him.  If they’re successfully able to become better people, then it proves that the whole Good Place/Bad Place system is based on a false premise, and that it’s actually super immoral to send billions of basically mediocre people to…

I did not realize this until I went on IMDB afterwards, but the orderly is Titus’ rival from Kimmy Schmidt.

Jed killed the hawk, not Owen. 

“When I was a kid, I found this hawk in the park, and I just had this feeling that I had to protect it because it was so strong. But it was, like, hurt also, and I brought it home and I helped it get better. And then it ate my brother’s gerbil, and he killed it with a hammer, and I’ve…

I always think this is a really good article about “what does atonement actually look like.” To summarize, the person needs to satisfy four conditions. (1) Loss or punishment - they need to be smacked on the nose for purposes of deterrence and encouraging rehabilitation. (2) Restitution - they need to do something to…

But here’s the question we haven’t answered: does Louis CK owe us? Not the women he hurt, he undeniably owes them something (I don’t really know what that is, nor is it my place to say - kind of up to the women he hurt on a case by case basis)

I always think this article is a good exploration of “what people have to do in order to stop being shunned for their sexual misconduct” - this is the kind of thing that C.K. has been badly failing to do.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/can-penitent-sexual-predators-ever-be-granted-redemption

Jeez, Mr. Kavanaugh, I really think you should be keeping a low profile right now instead of commenting on message boards

And if they don’t make this session, even if they rammed him through, he’d have to sit out the whole session & wait for the next one.

A lot of publications also embed tweets nowadays instead of copy/pasting them.  If a tweet is deleted off Twitter, the article embed no longer works.

I mean, that is definitely not true with regards to the Fourth Amendment, and the massive level of secret, unaccountable spying that the government does via digital technology.  But I imagine that’s not the point that poster was making...

Gab is a small network of people who are already dedicated internet Nazis. That’s good for one use case they have (making sure everybody is on the same page). But it’s bad for a number of other right-wing use cases (harassing normal people, getting new recruits, boosting tweets to be popular enough that lazy…

“Searebro” is pretty great

It seems like a lot of people are talking about this season as being too static, or too similar to previous seasons, or Bojack being stuck in an unchanging loop or whatever. But that just seems crazy to me. That’s what personal trauma is - it’s a pattern of ingrained reactions to stimuli, which may have been helpful…

The Princess Carolyn moment (and her entire relationship with Bojack) made sense to me, because her particular issue is that she’s codependent. She grew up with an addict who she cared about (her mom), and derived her sense of self-worth from helping her mom cover or compensate for her addiction, without being able to…

“Like a fish needs a bicycle,” in our world, is an absurd statement because fish don’t have legs or live on land, so they have no need for a bicycle.  In the world of Bojack, however, it’s not absurd (because fish have legs and can go on land and use bicycles).  The lack of absurdity underlines the absurdity of…

I think it’s specifically about the way that male showrunners can be praised for their genius (which sometimes even actually exists! not Flip though) by critics and fans, while ignoring their shitty interpersonal behavior. Think David Milch, David Chase, Dan Harmon, etc.

I feel like the show’s point of view (as expressed by Diane) is explicitly that “irredeemable” is an empirically false concept, though. People aren’t definitively good or definitively bad - they just do good or bad things. Bojack did a really bad thing, for sure. But that doesn’t mean that he’s irredeemable; it just…

Would Diane have accepted a hug, though?