Well, I also think, especially in the case of science fiction actioners like Star Wars and Star Trek, is framing and context. Framing and context are simultaneously necessary for understanding and accepting the stakes of what’s happening in the film, and something that Abrams especially is so bad at.

One of the wages of whiteness is that being white affords you spaces wherein you never have to hear the word “no”, and have that “no” have teeth.

We can begin by thinking about Black wealth and Black prosperity in terms of extractors—systems or enterprises drawing money out of the Black community—and investment, as scholar and writer Andre Perry advises. But it also requires questioning the philosophies that lay the foundation for how federal, state, and local…

I’m most surprised he said it aloud. Trump . . . is not a smart person, but he does know his audience and caters to them. And his audience really doesn’t go in for polysyllabic words (see what I mean?). Using words with more than two syllables is read by a certain subset of America showing off. This subset also…

Yeah, that was a book where, even at the time I read it at about 11 or so, I thought to myself “oh, this is R.A. Salvatore for adults!”, because even at that tender age, I recognized the combination of technology fetishism, and the plot contrivances required to keep the situation from going nuclear, which would have…

For my money, it was either this one:

One of the worst things about being in the long-term unemployed during the Great Recession was how upper-middle class white people would simply refuse to accept the concept of “structural unemployment”. There were peer-reviewed articles that demonstrated mathematically that employers were systematically screening out…

Well, if Conan O’Brien taught me anything in college, it’s that a desk, a fake steering wheel and a green screen is good for at least six minutes of unbridled terror.

You can tell the quality of the actor in this film by how much they got what this film was about, and how much resultant fun they had with the role. Nobody in the central love triangle got this film at all, which is a big reason why the film works. But Meyer and NPH both got it, and Clancy Brown and Michael Ironside de…

As merciless satire goes, that might even beat out the Onion news story about how the Rochester PD instinctively put an unregistered handgun next to the downed Frederick Douglass statue. . . .

That’s why its bullshit when liberals task each other with decency over these fuckers. I will be gleeful if one of the assholes in this admin dies from coronavirus because I know none of them would give a shit if it was the other way round.

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…