Edwin MacPhisto

Boners aren't really the sole criteria for video quality. I generally like Missy Elliott videos, though the "MY VIDEOS ARE WEIRD" thing had gotten fairly old by This Is Not A Test! For being a remarkable band, Interpol has some dull fuckin' videos. The recent one for "Evil" with the retarded puppet takes the cake.

Yeah. The cop's flashlight on Dwight's face did it too. Happened a few times throughout.

I've garnered from this thread that poor Rando has worked for at least five years at no less than 2 different fast food restaurants. You can at least get to retail, man.

Just saw it. Decent movie, little more than that. Looked fantastic, almost completely emotionless, and pretty calm altogether. Some touches were great, a lot was just there. I'm glad to have seen it, loved Arrow Guy, and enjoyed all the stories, but it's not groundbreaking in anything but a visual sense, and even that aspect often seemed flat.

College football: Virginia beats Florida State at home, so I get to see a huge victory live while I'm still a student here.

Great karaoke choice.

Sentence, really. I should have used a semi-colon and left it all as one.

I didn't watch the preview nor will I be reading them, so thank you Tyler for starting off the spoiler tags. Unreal that they actually went through with it. The writers have been very clever this year; for the past three years, they'd always set something up as fairly obvious, and then twist you at the end. I expected Anderson to be actually going after a different target, like some stadium or something that could be a big public gathering. But no, they blew the president out of the sky. Crazy, and nice to see CTU fail for once. They haven't been this low since the whole building got blown up at the beginning of season 2. The Mummy is without a doubt the most successful 24 mastermind to date. The only real lame part was introducing Keeler's kid right there to garner some extra sympathy and tragedy points, trying to alleviate the non-connection to him that packwing pointed out.

Left Left Left Left Left Wall wins

I know you've done this before, but I can't find it. Tip me to some Neurosis I'll possibly like, keeping in mind that I very much like Tool but am also a little wimpy munchkin when it comes to metal.

I actively dislike everyone on that list except Franz and Bloc Party. Futureheads are fine too, though I haven't given their album more than a once-over. I'll listen to it again tonight.

Those are some awfully big assumptions you're making. I tend to think that my explanation makes more sense, as I'll illustrate throughout this post. This is my big problem with your argument. You assume that people who don't support the war follow a "liberal logic," which you have yet to explain. What is this "liberal logic," why is it different from the logic that anyone else uses, and why on earth do you have any reason to assume that it's the way I (or anyone else, for that matter) form thoughts? I believe you're arguing a very poor straw man here, because the condition you oppose actually doesn't exist in any significant fashion. I can support someone doing a job the duty of which I disagree because the decisions have already been made, on an unalterable scale, and to back away from them now would be even worse than having gone. We've made our bed to rebuild Iraq and, late in the game, proferred the explanation that we're doing it for the sake of uplifting the people and establishing a functioning democracy. Now we have to do it. As I have said many times before, I don't for a second presume that my personal views can dictate foreign policy, especially ex post facto. The important decisions have been made and no one in their right mind is going to argue that having American soldiers fail in their objectives and get killed is going to be for the benefit of the nation. Furthermore, they're people! Jeez. How hard is it to see that I don't want a bunch of 20somethings to die? Well, I've never watched Babylon 5, but declaring martial law and dissolving the legislative branch of the government seem to be a lot more actionable by the citizenry than going into a war that may or may not have been the right thing to do at this point in history and primarily affects the actual fighting force. I don't think the comparison works. Because they're part of a volunteer army? Because they signed up for this job? Because they themselves might actually want to fight? Your argument is a false dichotomy; the rightness or wrongness of a decision made by the U.S. State department and Congress is not parallel to the convictions of an individual soldier. I support soldiers following orders because it's their job to follow orders, and if soldiers didn't follow orders and observe the chain of command, the entire structure of a large military force would collapse. If you want to get into really specific examples (e.g., Abu Ghraib), then yes, following orders can sometimes be a bad thing, but in general it's the core of how a state military operates.

Fun fact: Ringo Starr in fact played the Pope in the movie Lisztomania, starring Roger Daltrey as pianist Franz Liszt, engaged in an eternal war with proto-Nazi Richard Wagner. Movie's fantastic, especially when Daltrey rides an 8-foot long papier-mache penis.

But these people are putting their lives on the line for something they believe in. They are following orders. The whole "we don't support the war, though" is a form of patronization. I see it as more of a gesture of pity than of support. How is that patronizing? If anything, I think it indicates a paramount respect for the people doing the actual fighting. That's how I feel: I still don't think this war was particularly necessary, but we're in it, so I hope we win it with absolutely the fewest possible casualties. I don't think most people who oppose the war are so self-important that they think their individual opinions are nearly as important as the lives of American soldiers.

A persistent vegetative state is deceptive like that. Looks like she's responding, but she ain't. The brain is liquid, and it's mindless reflex action at best. Sad and tricky.

Congrats, guys! Makes me feel all old and proud and stuff.

Jingus is so tough. And dopey on this: Don't believe the hype. There was nothing left there, no matter what some quack "Nobel prize nominated doctor" tells you. I'm not going to discuss it anymore but read the rest of this thread or any of the actual evidence on this case and you'll see that your tough talk about "finding out the truth" is really, really silly.

I don't think Ben Folds albums "drop," really.

Joanna Newsom is awful enough to make me think that rape might be OK.

Yeah, I'm sure those fagtastic Asian puppet aliens will finally have their moment in the sun or something.

The Cure's collected albums are actually pretty good starters. The two worthwhile collections are Staring at the Sea for early stuff through The Head on the Door, and Galore for everything after. I could do without a few tracks ("Hot Hot Hot" and "Never Enough," namely), but they're largely solid. I'd say you can split the Cure up into two sets of two styles: minimal vs. lush, or angsty vs. gleeful. My particular favorites out of the hits are "A Night Like This," "In Between Days," "A Letter To Elise," and "Pictures of You." One non-hit you should put on there is "Plainsong," a really gorgeous track off Disintegration.

I'm gonna print those out and make a flipbook.

Me too. I was still pissed about how gay the new Star Wars movie was.

Besides the show being great, this sounds a lot like one of my favorite computer games of days past. Back in about 1996 or so, Activision came out with a game called Spycraft which had you doing all the same kind of stuff: interrogations, satellite tracking, shootouts, etc. Fun as hell, and full of all sorts of great B-actors like Charles Napier and the fat guy from Poltergeist.

Never said politics don't apply to study of foreign cultures, but the stuff I listed doesn't have to with foreign cultures. Anthropology, sure, but that's a few miles away from history. The majority of study done at colleges nationwide doesn't depend on political ideology. The other stuff you say is basically condensed here, so this is where I'll respond. I haven't studied enough on the history of communist ideologies myself to debate its historical merits and flaws, but I will say that there are a pile of social theorists, generally starting with Marx, passing through Weber, and so on, who developed systems that formed the roots for Communism. There's a lot more foundation and suggestion for the productive possibilities of Marxism and its many socialist offspring than there are for the more strictly fascist lineage of Nazism, which may serve as an explanation as to why it receives less overt criticism. Moreover, the run of the Nazi party is a much briefer one in time, and it's over. Communism existed massively until little more than a decade ago, and it still exists in very significant amounts today. Historians are still getting perspective and without finite ends, history is still being written. Additionally, I don't think replacing liberal professors with conservative professors is going to change the level of study tremendously; the same function of history-writing and publication can come out of the think-tank environment, and there are plenty of conservative groups in that vein who, going by your line, should be responsible for illuminating this. Unless you also want to assess a massive conspiracy in the realm of journal publication that's kept this off-limits, I still don't think the harms you attribute to self-identifying liberals in academia are nearly as vast as you make them out to be. How false is that. Here's how a round of parli debate works. One team of two debaters presents a case or resolution they've designed--they're the government. Another team of two debaters responds to that case extemporaneously, with no prep time beyond the length of the government's speeches--they're called the opposition. They can't say "we don't agree with the side we have to take"; they just debate it. And they win. Thousands of high schoolers and college kids do this every week. I debate parli every few weeks, and I judge 2 or 3 huge tournaments annually. Statistically, opp wins about 3 out of 5 times. If college and high school kids can do it effectively, I'm sure William F. Buckley and any other intellectual can do it effectively too.