TV

Ridiculously Obscene

In what kind of society would it be possible to separate identical twins at birth, but have them retain the same last names, and bring them together at some later date just to see how they react to each other? In what kind of society, or social system, would it be possible for such a long-term experiment on two human beings to be carried out?

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comment at ‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: We’re The Greater Good

founding the sacrificial state and the incipient civil religion, a system of mutual obligations justifying living, as well as killing and dying,

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The Better Part of “Bravery”

Those looking for a reason to condemn the ad presume, for no good reason it seems to me, that the young woman was simply accosted by a stranger or near-stranger. That might indeed be rather rapey – just not very likely based on common sense about High School classes, about what we are given to assume about the young man (he is presented as a sensitive and self-conscious kid), and most of all what we see in the young woman’s lovestruck and very highly cooperative reaction. She may not have signed a notarizable contract, but it seems that our hero must have correctly interpreted signals prior to as well as in the moment, and that there will be no charges filed. By the end of the ad, we and our hero may safely anticipate the most delightful sequel known to human beings on Earth.

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Rooting for the Zombies

The zombie is a perhaps only slightly exaggerated version of the slave or other member of the lower orders from the perspective of the privileged. Like the hungry poor, the zombies confront the responsible citizen as insatiably ravenous mouths to feed, the “unreasoning mob” itself, human as less than human, pure destructive appetite. At the same time, the terrifying joy of the zombie movie, like the terrifying joy both of other apocalyptic genres and of the slave revolt, lies in the destruction of one form of inhumanity by the other that it has produced, or is produced from it. We witness or continually re-experience the liberating annihilation of the whole constricted, compromised, and evil world, all of its inequities, and all of its false values.

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The Brady Bunch Annihilated

What could better capture the nihilistic impetus of philosophical liberalism – individualized instrumental reason – than its discovery of the moral impossibility of human reproduction itself?

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More on Breaking Bad: Setting up S5 and vs. House

Looking forward to Breaking Bad Season 5, I realize that one main reason to be a bigger fan of BB than of the well-regarded House is if, like me, you know you’re a loser – which means “in the wrong from the perspective of a wrong world.”

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You act like you never saw a severed human head on a tortoise before

…been catching up on all the Seasons 2 – 3 Breaking Bad I missed. Doing a whole season this way has a lot to recommend it over sitting through a season episode by episode, week by week.

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Chris Hayes and American Heroism

The word “hero” in contemporary usage is an unambiguously affirmative, but anodyne, secular-sounding term for the conversion of the “fallen” from tragic victims into celebrated martyrs within a long tradition, indeed within a trans-generational chain of sacrifices all the way back to the founding of the nation in revolutionary war. To deny access to this form of transcendence, as Hayes and many like him seem to want to do – are in a sense ideologically compelled to do – is to reduce whatever act of war into killing and mayhem merely, the conduct of a state possibly unworthy of allegiance at all, much less of even one individual’s life, liberty, and happiness. It is to convert the martyr symbolically into the pitiful dupe at best, the murderer or war criminal at worst.

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Ghost Machine

self(-)consumption

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BIG: New KB24 Commercial

…why we still kind of like commercials… and basketball… and Kobe… pretty much no matter what.

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