The only guy who says that and believes it the whole way through is the villain, who is a violent and immature crackpot. Bob and Dash say that at the beginning, before the character development that the whole movie centers around that disabuses them of that notion. Bob's selfishness and arrogance almost get his whole…

I actively try to be anti-nihilist in my worldview, but you'd have to cut out most of history's greatest comedians and satirists if you refused to take in anything with a nihilist streak. So when I listen to, say, George Carlin I laugh at some stuff and just kind of let my mind wander when he starts going on about how…

Then where does communism fit in to that spectrum? Had it not been tied to agrarianism in the 1910s-20s as strongly as it would be later on in China and Cambodia and so forth? Honest question, because I don't know. In America at least, the populist parties of that time depended on poor rural workers as their base of…

I've got very juvenile tastes, so take that for what it's worth. I liked Horse and His Boy and Voyage of the Dawn Treader the best, and they're the odd ducks of the series, being much more adventure romps than moral parables. The others, I liked them fine (I actually thought Caspian and LWW, the two most famous ones,…

I'm probably not enough of an expert to debate this in-depth, but he feels a lot different from modern conservatism. Distributism as an economic philosophy by itself would be enough.

Aside from The Last Battle, the Calormenes are always what comes up as proof that Lewis was a crank. It's been a while but I always felt that it wasn't an inherently evil culture so much as one where the protagonist felt like he didn't belong.

In the dead-guys department, sometimes Chesterton waxes so poetic about provincial agrarianism and orthodox Catholicism that I have to stop and remind myself that I don't actually agree. Interesting bloke, though: in many ways both a pacifist and a socialist, despite history remembering him as a hardcore conservative.

That one does make me grit my teeth a little. It feels like a high school Young Republicans' skit about how politicians are all pussies and rich dudes are badass.

Right wing bullshit-radio does not qualify for me, because I hate it and disagree with it. Even if I was the sort of fellow who, say, believed that Obama was causing Ebola to give Medicare to illegal immigrants, I would not feel the need to have that SHOUTED IN MY EAR for HOURS at a time.

Weird as it sounds, I actually often get more annoyed with stuff that I 'agree' with, because, through no fault of the authors, I'm usually not very challenged or broadened by it. One example I can think of that is picking up a Tom Holt book and the very first page might as well have been HEY I BET YOU THINK ALL THIS…

As sleazy as the show is, I do like that part. It's like a giant fuck you to all the dozens of shows that portray that inhumanly competitive education system as something so light and fluffy.

I'd say basically anything that glorifies happiness in servitude, which is a lot of stuff, from Shakespeare to the Bible. If life was actually as hardscrabble now for so many people as it was back then, the calculus of shelter and protection vs. 'freedom' to barely scrape out a backbreaking existence would be a lot…

Bob can't stop helping people who won't or can't pay him back. Conversely, his greedy profit-obsessed boss is portrayed as a complete dick. Also, the family only starts winning when they start working together as a team. It's the villain who thinks he can do everything by himself and screw what everyone else thinks.

I've yet to finish a single episode of that without feeling completely filthy. And yet I keep going.

afterwards: HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HAVE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.

Those I don't mind so much, although I know a lot of people hate them. To me it reads as closer to using a verb phrase in place of a dialogue tag, and if anything it cuts down on unnecessary words. ("'You shouldn't have come back,' he frowned", vs. "He frowned. 'You shouldn't have come back', he said.")

Yeah, I agree with that. I'd go with a 3:1 or 4:1 said/not-said ratio at least, and the latter should mostly be descriptors of sound and tone, not just fancy synonyms. It's just that some people get really nuts about these 'rules'. I guess it's trying to grasp for objective answers in a field that doesn't really have…

I dunno. How-to-write advice should in general be edited to say 'how to write like this author/in this style.' You could do a lot worse than Elmore Leonard, obviously, but some variety is nice. I feel very alone in insisting that a book that uses nothing but 'said' doesn't keep the prose tight and smooth so much as…

Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.

My client objects to this slander. The kid was 3 years old, so he is technically a toddler-puncher.