That show is a delight.

Y’know after the Arab Spring I was willing to give Twitter a chance and believe that it was possible that it could be a force for good in the world but...

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, but Dr. Cox saying “Better get ready to run away from me while I eat cupcakes and demonstrate how to have painfully evocative sex” is more funny than it has any right to be.

Agreed.

I like her. (Don’t much care for the show, but that’s another matter.)

Ah! But what’s interesting (/horrifying) is that a lot of the people around him (from Bannon on up to Putin/Thiel and beyond) are playing chess, and they seem to see him as a useful idiot.

This http://robertreich.org/post/166342259895 is worth a read.

Yeah. And he’s saving North Korea for sweeps.

Plus I seem to recall a bunch of publications getting mad at SNL for not making any jokes last week.

I know that that’s a line from the episode but... it’s kinda true, right?

I heard somebody on NPR being interviewed a while back, they were recounting how after a loved one had been murdered they couldn’t watch any TV shows that dealt with murder (so, most of them, I assume)- I totally get that, I’m the same way with other (admittedly less traumatic) stuff.

You have to see it from his point of view: how can he Make America Great Again when all the meanies on his picture box are constantly making him aware of how unloved he is and how he will never, ever, fill the gaping hole in his soul?

“Good Guy With A Gun” is an interesting point. I never read Punisher’s solo books but in the stories I did read where he showed up he was always regarded as this sort of pitiful/dangerous weirdo. The good guys tolerated him (kinda like how Professor X tolerated Magneto) but I don’t think they ever embraced him. (Or,…

I totally agree, but there’s a darker (though equally theological) take on it, too, which is more in a demiurge/gnostic direction. (That is, we’re in a gross, warped version of true reality.)

And then it becomes a very real possibility that said God is just a teenage sadist, like me when I deliberately built dystopias in SimCity 2000.

I’m no sciencematician, but doesn’t this presuppose that the universe in which the hypothetical alien computer exists in operates on the same fundamental laws of physics that ours does?

I can’t speak to the specifics of the sex part of it, but being suspended from hooks (maybe not like they’re depicted in the show but as a general proposition) is a thing:

It started to dawn on me somewhat during the Obama years how much of a rube I had been all through Bush when I kept trying to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt - not that I ever agreed with them, not that I thought they were good, but I at least thought they were sincere in their beliefs (hard work, patriotism,…

To be (moderately) fair to that line of thinking, I’ve always interpreted it as a sort of corruption of mystic thinking, which tends to be much more brutal; ie, terrible things happen for no good reason and our job is to try to accept that, carry on, and marvel at the wonder of creation regardless.

Yeah.