Things I’ve learned from reading comics: Time Travel is messy, the good guys always win, sometimes the good guys lose, sometimes winning isn’t quite winning, you can be good and poor, you can be good and rich, you can be bad and poor, you can be bad and rich, the weak can outsmart the powerful, power won’t make you an asshole, if you’re an asshole power will make you a...
When compared to some great classic war movies, Dunkirk is both mediocre and unnecessary. Nolan, it seems, can’t forget that Memento is what initially made him, and uses a time-shifting device that is both unnecessary to the drama and gimmicky to the point of tediousness. To make matters worse he deliberately dispenses with one word (“ago”) that might have made viewers enjoy the time-shift...
Saw “War For The Planet of The Apes” yesterday and it was very, very good. I was worried that it would be an all-out ‘war’ movie with big action set-pieces, but despite that it has a bit of that, it focused much more on the ongoing development of Caesar and his development as a leader and as a moral being who’s desperate to do what’s right. This trilogy has...
People often think of current cultural time as divided between ‘pre-internet’ and ‘post-internet’, and they generally attribute all the modern online insanity to the latter. However, in doing so, they forget that there were, in reality, 3 phases worth examining when discussing the online shift. First, we had pre-internet, then we had internet pre-social media, and then...
It’s the height of intellectual laziness to accuse any man who has anything to say about women or gender relations of ‘mansplaining’. It’s not clever. It betrays a complete inability to actually tackle or reply to whatever arguments are being made. It is, if you haven’t noticed, a form of ad hominem attack, the cheapest rhetorical device on the planet, where rather...
It seems like an obviously bad idea to bash anybody anywhere for sympathizing with victims of a crime. Having said that, it’s also a bad idea to ignore why some people are taking offense, not to the sympathy itself, but to the selectivity on which some of this sympathy seems to be based. There are many factors involved, and it might be prudent to at least examine a few of the factors...
Too often, we react to other people’s posts on social media as though they represent the final conclusions, thoughts, and emotions of those posting. More often than not, they are nothing but their first reactions, first thoughts, to events that have taken place. To assume otherwise is, in most cases, a mistake.
The notion that Charlie Hebdo is a purely satirical magazine that attacks everybody and cannot, therefore, be considered racist seems to generally be espoused by well-meaning but uninformed people. The fact of the matter is that in 2009, Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist after he mocked Jews and yet, has no issues consistently running Anti-Muslim cartoons that go out of their way to offend the...
Americans, like citizens from other countries that have ‘absolute’ freedom of speech, do not quite understand that in France, things aren’t quite the same way. For example, in France, Roger Garaudy, a historian, was sentenced to jail after writing a book. He was accused of ‘holocaust denial’ for his book “The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics.” Now I’ve read his book, and I can tell you this, he...
There are certain things people need to realize first to sense the necessity of change and, in some cases, the urgency. Let’s start with a basic social truth – there is no ‘bottom.’ Your society, community, or state is not some rubber ball bouncing towards the ground that must inevitably hit bottom and bounce back up. Things that fall will – unless something changes – continue to fall. The...
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