As Upton Sinclair noted, it is difficult to get a person to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. At this point, the voters for the President are a known quantity, and their quantity is that they are perfectly willing to countenance any injustice being perpetrated on people they…

Well, it kind of is: when your only cause for pride is your whiteness, taking away that whiteness is an injury of a sort. Just, ya know, not one that anyone should really have taken pride in having in the first place.

I could never get a handle on the guy. I enjoy his movies, but he also seems like someone who wanted to have it both ways - both to bring judgment on the excesses of pop culture, but also indulge in those same excesses.

It’s also a function of how misogyny also imposes harmful standards on men as well as women. The entire point of trying to create some arbitrary code of honor defining “masculinity” is as much to say what femininity is not, as it is to say what masculinity is.

. . . Because she’s 50 years old, and yet she’s married to a man who routinely puts women out to pasture if they are past the age of 35?

It’s probably a combination of “boy who cried wolf” and the fact that the public has already made up its mind about who Biden is, but yeah, basically, Biden’s strength is that he is simultaneously well-defined to the public, and defined in a way that basically immunizes him from the kind of attack the Republicans want…

I don’t know that it’s even that complex, and honestly, having dealt with narcissists before? That sounds like standard-issue mental backfilling that accepting the narcissist’s worldview entails. The reason why Trump’s election strategy makes no sense is because, as counterintuitive as it may sound, the first goal of…

William Saleton had a pretty good article over on Slate which reinforced that basic point. Essentially, whether you like it or not (and for the record, I do not), there are a lot of older white people who look at Confederate statues and the Confederate flag, and just don’t see what the big deal is. And Trump is…

You’re right, in that “Karen” is far better used in those circumstances where a white woman’s privilege is obnoxious and racist, but does not reach the level of life-threatening. But by the same token, naming something has power, but in being able to accurately identify what you’re seeing, and in affixing a value…

Yeah, the reason why Mayor Vaughn from Jaws feels so real right now, in no small part, is because Mayor Vaughn pretty accurately reflects how local governments work in practice. They’re there to keep things on an even keel, not create crises, and just generally smooth things over for the major businesses in the area.…

I was about to suggest Love, Actually, but a consultation with IMDB, meant to confirm my suspicions, revealed only that Laura Linney, Bill Nighy, Liam Neeson, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Alan Rickman have only won the Oscars of my heart. As actual Oscar winners go, it’s only has Emma Thompson and Keira Knightley.

Yeah, I’m fairly certain it was grandfathered in, and helped along by the fact that it was 1) basically “can we cast someone from the then-contemporary Justice League Unlimited cartoon?”, 2) the fact that Justice League Unlimited is pretty impeccably voice-casted, and 3) the fact that the entire thing about voice…

It’s at an intersection of Wicker Man and “Rihanna’s Met Ball Costume” that, until this moment, I didn’t even know existed.

edit: sorry about the “you people”

No, but there always seem to be carrots in there that have been softened under mysterious circumstances.

She’s “explaining” only in the sense that she’s accurately describing the pre-conditions whereby a movement conservative will accept a critique of movement conservative behavior. Namely, they will accept a critique only if you can first find a liberal who is doing something identical, or at least equally obnoxious.…

Well, there is technically a third form of protection. But it might be a little extreme . . .

I feel that. Admittedly, the games I play now tend to be more violent than in the past, but by far the main reason why Civilization II held such immense replay value for me was the intensely satisfying feeling of constructing cities from the ground up, from small cities to sprawling metropolitan areas, and checking…

I’m glad you caught the reference.

Let me tell you about a few of the tac­tics of the cur­rent woke mob: They bomb your e-mail with what can only be called hate speech. They twist your words and ac­tions. They make up things that you al­leg­edly said and did that you never said or did. They tar­get you and your fam­ily on so­cial me­dia. They bully…