Is Megan McArdle actually surprised that no one mentioned Obamacare at the debates? Or is this rhetorical surprise? The Affordable Care Act barely came up. What candidates wanted to talk about was Medicare-for-all. That is nothing short of extraordinary. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the biggest entitlement expansion, and the most significant… Read More The Democrats are Democrats
The Kingdoms of Bran the Broken is neither a Kingdom nor is it Bran’s. Discuss. This analysis, from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, argues that the introduction of Elective Monarchy to Westeros, and especially the election of Bran Stark as its first elected king, is doomed to failure. The reasons are as follows: With the… Read More Bran Stark is Hosed – A Reasonable Prediction From the End of Game of Thrones
There’s a throwaway line in Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, wherein two FBI agents who’ve been wiretapping the titular character, and are listening to him have a heartfelt conversation on the phone with his wife. One of the agents says to the other “compared to King, this guy’s a monk.” That movie came out in 1992.… Read More The Story is That We’re Ignoring the Story
In retrospect, both of the statements in this headline invite a “duh” response. HBO’s current stock-in-trade is prestige TV series, and it’s been apparent since the second season of True Detective that prestige television is an exercise in miserabilism. Nothing good can happen and everyone of value has to die or lose what they love unless… Read More HBO’s Chernobyl is Misery Porn, and Therefore Largely Inaccurate
I detest serial killers. By which I mean, I detest the attention paid to them by popular culture. There is a sickness in being as aware of them as we are, something concupiscent in our fascination with twisted pyschopathy. That being said, I am hardly less guilty. I regard From Hell (the graphic novel, not the movie)… Read More Quick Review: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile
I spent a day angry about the Game of Thrones finale. I won’t go into the why, because I’m going to write something larger on that topic later on. Put me in the group of fans that found it highly unsatisfying and leave it at that. Many of those same people have been saying that the… Read More When You Need the Tropes – Game of Thrones Edition
It’s a longish post, but well worth your time. In science fiction stories, there are a limited number of ways to explain the conundrum of how time travel can work in a world where there is both the appearance of free will and the appearance of cause and effect. I doubt I can list all… Read More John C. Wright on Time Travel: An Absurdity Wrapped in a Non-Starter
Anger be now your song, immortal one Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous that caused the Akaians loss on bitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men– carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done. -The Iliad Below the fold, the climactic scene in the episode,… Read More What Came to me Watching Last Week’s Game of Thrones
Via, Rotten Chestnuts, a summation of scholar David Stove’s essay “Idealism, A Victorian Horror Story”. Apparently, everything the Left has believed for the last century and a half comes from the perception/things-in-themselves fallacy, which allows all the other word games to follow. Since you’re starting from a tautology, thanks to the miracle of Dialectics you… Read More Post-Modernism and Critical Theory is all Based on The Worst Argument in the World
Everyone wins. Of course, these reductions in Federal taxing and spending would be accompanied by increases in State taxing and spending. However, these new State-level spending programs would reflect our present ideals and state of knowledge, and be more sustainable, effective, and appropriate than today’s legacy programs. Related government bureaucracies would be relatively lean and… Read More Cut the Federal Government in Half
Content Blues 