Very interesting perspective, hmm I had thought it similar to an extent to the Reconstruction period in terms of scope and magnitude of the shake-ups but that works.
So that's why the T-Rex had tiny arms: to pick locks and hack computers! A longstanding debate in paleontology has finally been resolved!
A classic example of cinema mediocrite is The Last Jedi. Presumably you didn't go after it because it's low-hanging fruit, but it really is a masterpiece in the genre. It's got all the fancy special effects, the original actors are there, it does an impression of a blockbuster movie... and then it's a steaming pile of plagiarism that goes full retard.
I too am a connoisseur of so-bad-it's-good. Alongside the aforementioned Birdemic, The Room and Troll 2 are other fine entries in the genre.
As for the Atlantic article... if firing career bureaucrats amounts to regime change, that's a tacit admission that the federal bureaucracy is an unelected shadow government, that Western democracy is mostly kabuki theater, and that Trump/Musk/MAGA/DOGE are right about everything and totally justified, lmao.
Great summary on both points. It probably is regime change, which Anne Applebaum likes everywhere else, and which is supposed to be a good thing if the existing regime is a “bad actor”.
It is difficult for me to see the West’s post Cold War regimes (at least) as wholly beneficent.
The Lost World and Prometheus are great examples of this. I have distinct memories of walking out of both of those movies feeling empty, knowing that something was lacking but I couldn’t quite explain what it was. The Matrix Reloaded and The Phantom Menace had this too.
Partial defense of _Casino Royale_ - in the novel it’s based on, Le Chiffre is a Soviet financier. The 2006 movie wanted to update the setting to the War on Terror - they just never stopped to consider whether Le Chiffre could have had the same amount of success legitimately.
Addendum: Le Chiffre COULD have made his money legitimately; the point is that he didn’t, and that’s why MI6 are interested in him. It’s not like there aren’t crooked bankers out there.
Hum, working 17 hours a day teaching, also 6 full time side jobs to keep you in potato money, raising a couple of pre-prubesent girls, two fingered typing these essays on a cell phone while driving to and from jobs, and you find time to watch all those movies?
Very timely, in that I spent two hours of my life last night watching George Clooney meander through his 2020 production, The Midnight Sky. I think the delusion starts with estrangement from self: George Clooney seems genuinely to believe that he is a lonely, tragic figure, and the illogic and implausibility just build from there. (Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio, by contrast, absolutely eat up their Leading Man roles and make sure you get the full actorly acting experience you paid for.) Know thyself remains very good advice.
Anne Appelbaum like many others has been under the liberal delusion a long time. The estrangement from reality is so long-standing and the neural pathways so fixed that when reality breaks through, as it inevitably must, the flailing attempts at retrospective justification kick in like fanboys frantically trying to salvage Prometheus: Trump is pulling down the goddam Statue of Liberty! 🗽 Our multi-trillion dollar funny money grift ... VIOLATED!
And, RIGHT ON CUE, your self-styled nemesis shows up in the comments to reveal his own brokenness. I can only watch in amusement and amazement. It's like a bad George Clooney film.
Independence Day is no one’s idea of sophisticated entertainment, but it’s not really what I mean. It didn’t have any major plot holes I can remember. The plot was simple, and at points implausible, but it knew better than to try to aim too high.
Why spend days hovering over cities waiting to blow them up? It would make sense if the aliens were trying to enslave the Earth humans. It made zero sense if they meant to merely exterminate humans. The title of the movie made no sense once it was determined that the aliens intended extermination all along.
And the idea of being able to hack an alien operating system in such a short period of time is ludicrous.
This was all really fantastic until the last paragraph about The Atlantic and Anne Applebaum, when—because you apparently can't help yourself, because there's always that darkness in you that must cleave the light, that libs-owning troll who must out himself, that emotional incompleteness without the shiv—you parody your own set-up of cin(ay)ma mediocrity(ay).
Anne Applebaum. Seriously? Anne Applebaum's absolutely accurate notion of regime change "disguises a program of ruinous and pointless chaos that will destroy human lives in exact proportion to the amount of problems it doesn’t solve?"
One, given that the entire paranoid and conspiracy-based structure of the QAnon-RadTrad-MAGA "vibe" is "The Deep State (whatever that is) = Pure Evil," how could it possibly be unreasonable to call what Trump is doing "regime change?" It's what you guys have been wanting for years, decades even. Why run from the characterization now?
Two, all those "liberals" who are soiling their drawers—all of those for whom the "Return of the Bling" is already being experienced as a pathetically bad and stupid movie—obviously and accurately believe that it is Trump and Musk and Russ Vought and their spineless gophers on Capitol Hill who are enacting "a program of ruinous and pointless chaos that will destroy human lives in exact proportion to the amount of problems it doesn’t solve."
I agree with them, of course. However, I'm not sympathetic to their hand-wringing because my own model for thinking about the world has predicted for years that "Trump the Sequel" (with, to use your archetypal landscape, J.D. Vance as The Penguin—wait, no, Leonard Leo is The Penguin—and Elon Musk as The Joker) would both be released and turn out to be far more terrible (and stupid) than anyone could have imagined even based on Trump the Original Release.
Three, I didn't really know who Chris Bray was until a minute ago, but now I do, and I can see why he's no longer either a journalist or a historian, and fully inhabited by only his "infantry sergeant" identity. I'm not really sure what he's trying to say in his Substack, surfeited as it is with contempt for those about whom he writes.
And maybe that's what I truly don't get. In life, which is short, one should only reserve time for worthy opponents. Your clan of "remnants" don't and can't respect your adversaries because you've dehumanized and departicularized them; they alternatively occupy your imaginations as either toe jam and viral encephalitis. That's your movie.
You might argue with conviction—because one thing the MAGA persona truly lacks is doubt, along with the humility that accompanies doubt—that the "liberals" (whatever that actually means at any particular moment in time, but for now let's presume it means coastal elites with college degrees, the sexually disordered and deviant, and the minority inhabitants of cities)—your orcs—have dehumanized and departicularized the virtuous, small folk of the ravaged heartland—your hobbits.
And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you on that point (although there are meaningful distinctions between the casual and thoughtless denigration of liberals by you and your chums and the casual and thoughtless denigration of the medieval right by me and my chums that bear scrutiny). In both instances, the claims are intellectually dishonest, more about conjuring feeling states than any semblance of truth or wisdom.
To my own credit, I've always taken the post-war radical and religious right in the United States seriously. I've studied it for major portions of my adult life (basically since I was 20). "Post-liberalism" remains an essentially empty term, but I have enormous respect for radical conservatism. You guys have a theory of power that liberal philosophy cannot comprehend. You scare the shit out of me. But I do take you seriously.
The Enlightenment has essentially ended. Despite your "Return of the King" testament, with your triumphalist claim that "The Age of Men Comes Once More," with the death of the Enlightenment, I believe "the Age of Men" is fully over. The past is dead. We're instead entering a new era with new challenges that will require new cosmologies. The final form these cosmologies remains unknown to us.
And so, sadly, we're in a war to shape the future. You may think this war has already been won (I know many distraught liberals believe you've won). But from my perspective, which is long-term, it will be decades before we know who has won (if indeed we ever do). In this sense, the war has only started. If you plan to win this war—if you want to know what it would even look like to win this war—I'd recommend you lay off the trolling and begin to take your adversaries seriously. Because they will arise, almost certainly in forms that you cannot even imagine.
___________
As a postscript, I was somewhat surprised you put so much effort into digging into my background when I first unloaded on you after the November election, when I read your intemperate and truly vile assault on the "hag shack." I was very angry about the outcome of the election, which I had witnessed from Berlin after writing 18 Substack posts tracking the final month of the campaign in the United States synchronously with the final month leading up the Reichstag Fire election in 1933 in Germany. I knew what the consequences of our election meant far more deeply than most people.
I believe I apologized for my outburst (if I didn't, I do now). However, you might recall that I also did follow up with a more measured assessment and criticism of your ideas and sensibilities, to the degree I was able to discern them. I'm sure you and your followers are not used to alien visitors to your comment threads who don't agree with you and have good reasons not to. But in truth, you need these aliens. In other words, you need your worthy opponents.
Now based on your assessment of me—90 percent of which either fell in the category of trolling or was simply misinformed—I'd say that your purpose was only to belittle (literally). The best example of this was your reference to my pitiful subscriber numbers in comparison to yours. None of this—the incorrect deductions about me based on imperfect information, the whose-dick-is-bigger swagger—troubled me. That being said, I was not impressed by the anti-Semitic responses of some of your followers—although I am not myself Jewish, not cool. You should concern yourself a bit more about that.
As it happens, I "am" of little consequence. You got that part right. And so perhaps you’re correct not to view me as worthy of a thoughtful reply. I write my Substack for friends and family members. I don't write to make money. But I'm also an essentially humble and solitary person. I don't require online attention, and would not know what to do with it if I had it. So no, I was more amused than I was troubled by your denigrations. But I hope they made you feel good.
Anyway, I do believe you're an exceptionally provocative, thoughtful, and gifted writer. You deserve your success and I hope more comes your way. But I really hope you'll also work harder to give your opponents their due. Else why waste your precious time.
Anne Applebaum is a grifting warmonger working alongside foreign interests to get people like the young men I teach slaughtered in the same pointless conflicts she’s been agitating for her whole career. Your reaction to my criticism is exactly what I mean and why the connection with film entertainment is relevant. Pretend that instead of Applebaum, Neil Breen typed up an essay making the argument that a permanent class of supposedly disinterested bureaucrats constitutes a lawful break on the president, as opposed to working for him with a responsibility to enact his policies. You have a PhD in this; can you tell me where in the Constitution that notion appears? The problem is that people like Applebaum have been wearing that document like a skinsuit since at least the 1930s and now that Trump is asserting his power under the law the managerial class is forced to invent novel theories of power since they can’t count on indifference anymore. Chris Bray is a brilliant writer whose career and cache on Substack I can only envy, and he made a wise choice coming to a platform that allows him to freely express himself without having to kowtow to venal mediocrities like Applebaum. Fortunately, as you note, the age of people like her is coming to an end.
I expect that very often my work will attract vehement criticism. During the time I’ve been here people have called me everything from vagina-brained to Jewish (I’m not either), and that was just one guy. Your mistake wasn’t attacking me; it was giving up. If you’ve read my work you’ll know that I started off waiting tables and after decades of work managed to reach the lofty heights of schoolteacher. I fought to get here and I’ll fight to stay. You don’t fight. The reason people don’t read your work isn’t because you’re dumb or a bad writer. It’s because your stuff is safe. It’s what you get in any academic milieu. “Religious right” (meaningless concept) is bad… whoaaaaaaaa!!!!
You’re not getting your ticket punched here; Substack is a cockpit. And spare me and yourself the cope- “I’m not writing to be read it’s just for my family and friends …” You want people to care what you think. It’s not arrogance. You have ideas you think are worthwhile, don’t you? You think the world is going in a bad direction, don’t you? Then where’s the sense of urgency? Are your friends and family still not convinced? The tell is something I noticed about academic types long ago- you said you were scared of the “religious right.” I used to know so many people who would go on and on about how frightened they were of George W, Bush or freaking Sarah Palin. STOP TELLING THE WORLD ALL THE THINGS YOU’RE SCARED OF!” There are people right now who would get me fired, destroy my family, and otherwise ruin my life if they could; if I were more prominent I have no doubt I’d be getting death threats from communist lunatics. I’m not scared of them. Whatever harm they can do me, in the end, they’re pathetic. I troll them every chance I get. That’s not because I’m especially brave, it’s because I have faith that I’m right and that the truth will out. The last four years were hard, but some measure of vindication has come, as I knew it would.
You’d do well to skip my stuff and read Chris Bray. He gets clear points across economically and entertainingly. Learn from your enemies. Man up. You’ll need it in the coming days.
Wow, that was nice thorough rebuttal to this person, who frankly doesn’t deserve the attention.
Maybe if dudes like Peter read a little more and wrote a lot less, we’d have more common ground, he’d have more readers, and be less “scared.”
So much of the conflict between the supposed left and right boils down to a willingness to read and listen. Leftists and centrists never do this. They project this own crappiness and spew propaganda. If they read more, they’d realize just how stupid and inconsistent their arguments really are, similar to thinking through the CM dreck you discuss.
I liked the comment, personally. If it arguably veered off-topic, then the original post also arguably veered off-topic, at its end. And while that comment reply admittedly has a lot of word count, it isn't the waste of time that you claim.
Also, I prefer opening discussions to summarily shutting them down. Especially given that I'm fond of reading two ably expressed opposing viewpoints. Neither of which I agree with entirely, in this case.
Tropic Thunder, I maintain, is the last great big-budget comedy. The “Never go full retard” scene, as with whole movie, simmers hilariously on multiple levels.
How did I not know of the genius of Neil Breen until this day.
Currently, DC is in the midst of a bloodless purge.
It is like nothing else within my lifetime, and FDR's '33 ascension to power is the closest I've found in the US context.
Interesting times...
Very interesting perspective, hmm I had thought it similar to an extent to the Reconstruction period in terms of scope and magnitude of the shake-ups but that works.
But don't you know he's just like Hitler?!
So that's why the T-Rex had tiny arms: to pick locks and hack computers! A longstanding debate in paleontology has finally been resolved!
A classic example of cinema mediocrite is The Last Jedi. Presumably you didn't go after it because it's low-hanging fruit, but it really is a masterpiece in the genre. It's got all the fancy special effects, the original actors are there, it does an impression of a blockbuster movie... and then it's a steaming pile of plagiarism that goes full retard.
I too am a connoisseur of so-bad-it's-good. Alongside the aforementioned Birdemic, The Room and Troll 2 are other fine entries in the genre.
As for the Atlantic article... if firing career bureaucrats amounts to regime change, that's a tacit admission that the federal bureaucracy is an unelected shadow government, that Western democracy is mostly kabuki theater, and that Trump/Musk/MAGA/DOGE are right about everything and totally justified, lmao.
Great summary on both points. It probably is regime change, which Anne Applebaum likes everywhere else, and which is supposed to be a good thing if the existing regime is a “bad actor”.
It is difficult for me to see the West’s post Cold War regimes (at least) as wholly beneficent.
The Lost World and Prometheus are great examples of this. I have distinct memories of walking out of both of those movies feeling empty, knowing that something was lacking but I couldn’t quite explain what it was. The Matrix Reloaded and The Phantom Menace had this too.
I disagree on the Phantom Menace. I felt like it was pretty good.
Partial defense of _Casino Royale_ - in the novel it’s based on, Le Chiffre is a Soviet financier. The 2006 movie wanted to update the setting to the War on Terror - they just never stopped to consider whether Le Chiffre could have had the same amount of success legitimately.
Addendum: Le Chiffre COULD have made his money legitimately; the point is that he didn’t, and that’s why MI6 are interested in him. It’s not like there aren’t crooked bankers out there.
Casino Royale is a good film--real Bond atmosphere!
Skyfall too!
Who cares about 'plots'?
Hum, working 17 hours a day teaching, also 6 full time side jobs to keep you in potato money, raising a couple of pre-prubesent girls, two fingered typing these essays on a cell phone while driving to and from jobs, and you find time to watch all those movies?
Hey, stretches my suspension of disbelief. GRIN.
You’ll notice they’re all movies from years ago for the most part. I’m burning my savings, artistically speaking.
Hahaha good burn
Very timely, in that I spent two hours of my life last night watching George Clooney meander through his 2020 production, The Midnight Sky. I think the delusion starts with estrangement from self: George Clooney seems genuinely to believe that he is a lonely, tragic figure, and the illogic and implausibility just build from there. (Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio, by contrast, absolutely eat up their Leading Man roles and make sure you get the full actorly acting experience you paid for.) Know thyself remains very good advice.
Anne Appelbaum like many others has been under the liberal delusion a long time. The estrangement from reality is so long-standing and the neural pathways so fixed that when reality breaks through, as it inevitably must, the flailing attempts at retrospective justification kick in like fanboys frantically trying to salvage Prometheus: Trump is pulling down the goddam Statue of Liberty! 🗽 Our multi-trillion dollar funny money grift ... VIOLATED!
And, RIGHT ON CUE, your self-styled nemesis shows up in the comments to reveal his own brokenness. I can only watch in amusement and amazement. It's like a bad George Clooney film.
America is the undisputed master of bullshit. We know how to wrap a turd. Some turds are so exquisitely wrapped you just have to respect the craft.
Thanks for the new concept, "Cinema Mediocrite", adding it to my toolbelt.
Section on Jaws XXXVIII is hilarious, not a single point deducted for picking of low-hanging fruit
It is hilariously bad. I still remember the final scene thirty odd years later, though
You didn't mention the Platonic Ideal of high budget Cinema Mediocrite: "Independence Day."
Watching that movie in the theater and seeing most of the audience enjoying it felt like living in a scene from Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons."
Independence Day is no one’s idea of sophisticated entertainment, but it’s not really what I mean. It didn’t have any major plot holes I can remember. The plot was simple, and at points implausible, but it knew better than to try to aim too high.
Independence Day II, however…
Why spend days hovering over cities waiting to blow them up? It would make sense if the aliens were trying to enslave the Earth humans. It made zero sense if they meant to merely exterminate humans. The title of the movie made no sense once it was determined that the aliens intended extermination all along.
And the idea of being able to hack an alien operating system in such a short period of time is ludicrous.
Good points. Haven’t seen it for years
Dear Mr. Librarian,
This was all really fantastic until the last paragraph about The Atlantic and Anne Applebaum, when—because you apparently can't help yourself, because there's always that darkness in you that must cleave the light, that libs-owning troll who must out himself, that emotional incompleteness without the shiv—you parody your own set-up of cin(ay)ma mediocrity(ay).
Anne Applebaum. Seriously? Anne Applebaum's absolutely accurate notion of regime change "disguises a program of ruinous and pointless chaos that will destroy human lives in exact proportion to the amount of problems it doesn’t solve?"
One, given that the entire paranoid and conspiracy-based structure of the QAnon-RadTrad-MAGA "vibe" is "The Deep State (whatever that is) = Pure Evil," how could it possibly be unreasonable to call what Trump is doing "regime change?" It's what you guys have been wanting for years, decades even. Why run from the characterization now?
Two, all those "liberals" who are soiling their drawers—all of those for whom the "Return of the Bling" is already being experienced as a pathetically bad and stupid movie—obviously and accurately believe that it is Trump and Musk and Russ Vought and their spineless gophers on Capitol Hill who are enacting "a program of ruinous and pointless chaos that will destroy human lives in exact proportion to the amount of problems it doesn’t solve."
I agree with them, of course. However, I'm not sympathetic to their hand-wringing because my own model for thinking about the world has predicted for years that "Trump the Sequel" (with, to use your archetypal landscape, J.D. Vance as The Penguin—wait, no, Leonard Leo is The Penguin—and Elon Musk as The Joker) would both be released and turn out to be far more terrible (and stupid) than anyone could have imagined even based on Trump the Original Release.
Three, I didn't really know who Chris Bray was until a minute ago, but now I do, and I can see why he's no longer either a journalist or a historian, and fully inhabited by only his "infantry sergeant" identity. I'm not really sure what he's trying to say in his Substack, surfeited as it is with contempt for those about whom he writes.
And maybe that's what I truly don't get. In life, which is short, one should only reserve time for worthy opponents. Your clan of "remnants" don't and can't respect your adversaries because you've dehumanized and departicularized them; they alternatively occupy your imaginations as either toe jam and viral encephalitis. That's your movie.
You might argue with conviction—because one thing the MAGA persona truly lacks is doubt, along with the humility that accompanies doubt—that the "liberals" (whatever that actually means at any particular moment in time, but for now let's presume it means coastal elites with college degrees, the sexually disordered and deviant, and the minority inhabitants of cities)—your orcs—have dehumanized and departicularized the virtuous, small folk of the ravaged heartland—your hobbits.
And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you on that point (although there are meaningful distinctions between the casual and thoughtless denigration of liberals by you and your chums and the casual and thoughtless denigration of the medieval right by me and my chums that bear scrutiny). In both instances, the claims are intellectually dishonest, more about conjuring feeling states than any semblance of truth or wisdom.
To my own credit, I've always taken the post-war radical and religious right in the United States seriously. I've studied it for major portions of my adult life (basically since I was 20). "Post-liberalism" remains an essentially empty term, but I have enormous respect for radical conservatism. You guys have a theory of power that liberal philosophy cannot comprehend. You scare the shit out of me. But I do take you seriously.
The Enlightenment has essentially ended. Despite your "Return of the King" testament, with your triumphalist claim that "The Age of Men Comes Once More," with the death of the Enlightenment, I believe "the Age of Men" is fully over. The past is dead. We're instead entering a new era with new challenges that will require new cosmologies. The final form these cosmologies remains unknown to us.
And so, sadly, we're in a war to shape the future. You may think this war has already been won (I know many distraught liberals believe you've won). But from my perspective, which is long-term, it will be decades before we know who has won (if indeed we ever do). In this sense, the war has only started. If you plan to win this war—if you want to know what it would even look like to win this war—I'd recommend you lay off the trolling and begin to take your adversaries seriously. Because they will arise, almost certainly in forms that you cannot even imagine.
___________
As a postscript, I was somewhat surprised you put so much effort into digging into my background when I first unloaded on you after the November election, when I read your intemperate and truly vile assault on the "hag shack." I was very angry about the outcome of the election, which I had witnessed from Berlin after writing 18 Substack posts tracking the final month of the campaign in the United States synchronously with the final month leading up the Reichstag Fire election in 1933 in Germany. I knew what the consequences of our election meant far more deeply than most people.
I believe I apologized for my outburst (if I didn't, I do now). However, you might recall that I also did follow up with a more measured assessment and criticism of your ideas and sensibilities, to the degree I was able to discern them. I'm sure you and your followers are not used to alien visitors to your comment threads who don't agree with you and have good reasons not to. But in truth, you need these aliens. In other words, you need your worthy opponents.
Now based on your assessment of me—90 percent of which either fell in the category of trolling or was simply misinformed—I'd say that your purpose was only to belittle (literally). The best example of this was your reference to my pitiful subscriber numbers in comparison to yours. None of this—the incorrect deductions about me based on imperfect information, the whose-dick-is-bigger swagger—troubled me. That being said, I was not impressed by the anti-Semitic responses of some of your followers—although I am not myself Jewish, not cool. You should concern yourself a bit more about that.
As it happens, I "am" of little consequence. You got that part right. And so perhaps you’re correct not to view me as worthy of a thoughtful reply. I write my Substack for friends and family members. I don't write to make money. But I'm also an essentially humble and solitary person. I don't require online attention, and would not know what to do with it if I had it. So no, I was more amused than I was troubled by your denigrations. But I hope they made you feel good.
Anyway, I do believe you're an exceptionally provocative, thoughtful, and gifted writer. You deserve your success and I hope more comes your way. But I really hope you'll also work harder to give your opponents their due. Else why waste your precious time.
Sincerely,
Peter
Thank you very kindly for the praise.
Anne Applebaum is a grifting warmonger working alongside foreign interests to get people like the young men I teach slaughtered in the same pointless conflicts she’s been agitating for her whole career. Your reaction to my criticism is exactly what I mean and why the connection with film entertainment is relevant. Pretend that instead of Applebaum, Neil Breen typed up an essay making the argument that a permanent class of supposedly disinterested bureaucrats constitutes a lawful break on the president, as opposed to working for him with a responsibility to enact his policies. You have a PhD in this; can you tell me where in the Constitution that notion appears? The problem is that people like Applebaum have been wearing that document like a skinsuit since at least the 1930s and now that Trump is asserting his power under the law the managerial class is forced to invent novel theories of power since they can’t count on indifference anymore. Chris Bray is a brilliant writer whose career and cache on Substack I can only envy, and he made a wise choice coming to a platform that allows him to freely express himself without having to kowtow to venal mediocrities like Applebaum. Fortunately, as you note, the age of people like her is coming to an end.
I expect that very often my work will attract vehement criticism. During the time I’ve been here people have called me everything from vagina-brained to Jewish (I’m not either), and that was just one guy. Your mistake wasn’t attacking me; it was giving up. If you’ve read my work you’ll know that I started off waiting tables and after decades of work managed to reach the lofty heights of schoolteacher. I fought to get here and I’ll fight to stay. You don’t fight. The reason people don’t read your work isn’t because you’re dumb or a bad writer. It’s because your stuff is safe. It’s what you get in any academic milieu. “Religious right” (meaningless concept) is bad… whoaaaaaaaa!!!!
You’re not getting your ticket punched here; Substack is a cockpit. And spare me and yourself the cope- “I’m not writing to be read it’s just for my family and friends …” You want people to care what you think. It’s not arrogance. You have ideas you think are worthwhile, don’t you? You think the world is going in a bad direction, don’t you? Then where’s the sense of urgency? Are your friends and family still not convinced? The tell is something I noticed about academic types long ago- you said you were scared of the “religious right.” I used to know so many people who would go on and on about how frightened they were of George W, Bush or freaking Sarah Palin. STOP TELLING THE WORLD ALL THE THINGS YOU’RE SCARED OF!” There are people right now who would get me fired, destroy my family, and otherwise ruin my life if they could; if I were more prominent I have no doubt I’d be getting death threats from communist lunatics. I’m not scared of them. Whatever harm they can do me, in the end, they’re pathetic. I troll them every chance I get. That’s not because I’m especially brave, it’s because I have faith that I’m right and that the truth will out. The last four years were hard, but some measure of vindication has come, as I knew it would.
You’d do well to skip my stuff and read Chris Bray. He gets clear points across economically and entertainingly. Learn from your enemies. Man up. You’ll need it in the coming days.
Also, everyone stop calling him Jewish.
Wow, that was nice thorough rebuttal to this person, who frankly doesn’t deserve the attention.
Maybe if dudes like Peter read a little more and wrote a lot less, we’d have more common ground, he’d have more readers, and be less “scared.”
So much of the conflict between the supposed left and right boils down to a willingness to read and listen. Leftists and centrists never do this. They project this own crappiness and spew propaganda. If they read more, they’d realize just how stupid and inconsistent their arguments really are, similar to thinking through the CM dreck you discuss.
But he is Jewish!
Who are you talking about again?
We can see that you don't mind wasting precious time.
I liked the comment, personally. If it arguably veered off-topic, then the original post also arguably veered off-topic, at its end. And while that comment reply admittedly has a lot of word count, it isn't the waste of time that you claim.
Also, I prefer opening discussions to summarily shutting them down. Especially given that I'm fond of reading two ably expressed opposing viewpoints. Neither of which I agree with entirely, in this case.
Sorry, Sims game.
What's going on in the Breen film is what might be called a spiritual experience lacking in self development.
This, I think, is what you identify as humbris, as opposed to the destructive quality of nievete.
I call it wrestling with a bad CGI tiger on a green screen.
That was CGI!?!?!?
😄
The postmodern cult of ugliness is a tragic wasteland of souls
Tropic Thunder, I maintain, is the last great big-budget comedy. The “Never go full retard” scene, as with whole movie, simmers hilariously on multiple levels.
Librarian, check out the Neil Breen Wikipedia page.
His eyes are closed in the picture they have (like people are usually trying to avoid). Do you think that's on purpose? I do!
Some of the people offended by the last paragraph are surely upset that they didn't see it coming as soon as you defined cinema mediocrity.
Excellent essay, per usual!
Thank you very much.
Great, now I think all of the writing of Librarian of Celaeno is CM and he is just trolling us this whole time.