He risked his own life a lot when he was younger, and some when he was older. I think he genuinely believed the glory of war stuff.

He was actually pretty understanding of Chamberlain. He said something like many times Chamberlain's approach of trying as hard as possible for peace would be the right thing to do, it just wasn't right in this case.

His biography of the Duke of Marlborough is really good.

I read The Story of the Malakand Field Force and The River War, and I came away with the impression that Churchill and the people he was fighting had more in common with each other than we would have with either of them.

This seems kind of unfair given that he was absolutely right that things were going in a dangerous direction and it would have been much easier to stop Germany sooner.

My favorite line from the sci-fi class I took in college was, "There's nothing as out of date as yesterday's tomorrow."

For me at least, the fantasy with Superman stories isn't to be Superman, it's to live in a world where Superman exists.

I played Catherine for a bit but stopped when I wasn't sure how to beat a level without killing any of the sheep people. I suspected the sheep people were actually other people having the same dream as me, that I looked like a sheep to them, and killing them would lead to them dying in the real world. (Maybe all that…

That quote is from Schenck v. United States. During World War I a socialist sent a flier to 15,000 men who were slated to be drafted urging them to resist the draft as a violation of their rights. He was jailed for giving aid the the enemy. The fire in a crowded theater quote is Holmes justifying the Supreme Court's…

Are you asking, how is who can speak at a public university a first amendment issue? I can give an amateur answer to that question.

This has got to be it. Or just a troll imitating the style. I think people who seriously argue like this tend to sound more upset, and this person just sounds like they're relentlessly attacking.

Wow, ZZT, I haven't thought about that game in years. I wonder if messing around with that when I was a teenager is part of why I became a programmer.

There's actually a version of the game with a commentary track by the designers. They talk about how in play testing people kept not picking up the cube in the very beginning of the level and then getting really frustrated. So they put the heart on it and had GlaDOS talk about it constantly to fix that. Then people…

You have to be able to blow some risks off though. Human beings aren't very good and understanding very small percentages, so at some point you have to round it off to 0 or you're going to be miserable. Just gut checking this, but if smoking a pack a day gives you a 1/3 chance of dying of cancer at some point, then I…

I love the BB finale. When Walt's prayer is answered and the keys fall into his lap, the in universe explanation is luck, but I took it as the writers admitting that Breaking Bad does have a god. There is an intelligence behind everything that happens, and in the end Walt makes it back to Albuquerque because the…

You're using the metaphor of a physical fight to understand something, and I'm saying that's a bad metaphor. There is no mugger, and getting angry won't help you punch them in the face. Getting angry hurts your ability to think and speak clearly. It is not helpful for getting people to change their minds.

I can picture the kind of conservative you're talking about, but saying most conservatives are like that is a bad case of sampling bias. The people who post a lot on the Internet are not a good stand in for people in general, and you're not helping the Internet's signal to noise ratio much now yourself.

Yeah, wait a minute, that part where society falls apart and the military vets end up running things is pretty much the definition of fascism, isn't it? Dang. Re-evaluating old memories with new knowledge.

A movie might be good, but I'm fine with the real story being a mystery reserved for people who read books.

It freaked me out, and I enjoyed it, at the time. It's one I don't want to re-watch for fear of being embarrassed by my past self though.