Just imagine what Christian Grey would have to say about Black Lives Matter if he knew that it existed. Can someone write some fanfiction about protestors occupying his tower and grounding his helicopter?

I hope I've got some time left with my dog. She's old for her breed, but in good apparent health and spirits. I'm not intending to get another after she's gone for a good long while, as I may well have some travelling to do, but I think one always comes back to it eventually (though I may go for a cat next, as it's…

I've been friends with the same group of guys since high school. This alpha-beta bullshit has never, to my knowledge, actually come up as a real concern (it's certainly come up as a joke). The only people I've known who have seriously described themselves as "alphas" are women. It's only a gender thing in the sense…

Pshh, cock density is the chief bragging metric. Everyone wants someone with a bit of depleted uranium in their pants.

Canadian here too. I grew up in a house with a couple of guns and virtually never saw them because they were locked in a safe. One thing that I don't entirely get when talking to Americans is the fear that gun control will be the end of gun ownership. We've had it for ages and lots of people still own guns. It's…

That's a different argument from what anhedonic's talking about, though. Anhedonic's point was about the supply chain and the way that guns get from manufacturers to the scenes of fatal shootings. I don't think it's inconsistent with your point about gun control laws being used for selective arrests.

"1 hours"

Is it inexorable, though? Do you see progress as inevitable? Many political belief systems incorporate some element of narrative. Marxism is the poster child for this, as it's based around this dialectical view of history where the past has necessarily led to the present, which will necessarily lead to a future of…

That's the difference right there. I've never needed a community of atheists, so I've never sought one out. Religion is pretty resolutely your own business where I'm from, so I've never had to take any shit for not believing. If I came from your town, I'd probably have an entirely different view of the whole…

My mistake. I figured that the financial crisis must have dealt a pretty serious blow to the nation's wealth.

It's a good point. One of my friends has a younger girlfriend and we occasionally have to fill her in on bits of Canadiana from our childhoods. We also gave her a quick primer on Bill Clinton after the last Mulaney special so as to make the last story a bit more resonant.

Same voice, mostly, but I think she sounds better now.

Oh, I thought you meant a generically ridiculous costume, not specifically the dog. My mistake!

"Please insert disk 15 of 538"

Oh man, is this a "but what if you could talk to the monsters" reference? I haven't heard one in years.

I get you there. I'm in Canada and the deficit is a perennial question. I'm just advocating looking at it from a long-term perspective, not so much where it is at any given point. A deficit might be high because of a fuckup, or it might be high because it just hasn't paid off yet. I figure that the US deficit is…

What was the costume?

You're a member of our weird silent generation, perhaps, the ones that helped build the modern internet but didn't take over social media the way the younger types have. I'm 32 and I'm never quite sure if the thinkpieces are talking about my generation or not.

I have a visceral distaste for debt, having spent so much of my life slowly burrowing out of it, so I see where you're coming from. I've learned not to get panicked about deficits, though, as I now know why they exist in an economic sense. The idea is, basically, that you're borrowing money from the future and…

I have two beliefs that I hold simultaneously that are somewhat uncomfortable with each other.