it’s all just arms and noses
Over Christmas I recommended Better Call Saul to my brother, calling it one of my top five shows. He asked what other shows I would put in my top five, and I suddenly had a really hard time naming 4 others that would be in that upper eschelon. There are certainly some that started out strong and then fizzled out along the way: Veronica Mars, Twin Peaks (oh, that first season is just on fire!), Lost and Game of Thrones come to mind. Fringe maybe less so, but still deteriorated in quality in the last season.
But let’s try to nail down a top five, shall we? Shows that are great from end to end, especially with a strong finish.
In no particular order:
- Seinfeld
- Firefly (Serenity counts as a “strong finish”)
- The Americans (This show takes number 1, even though this is an unordered list. It is heartbreakingly good.)
- Scrubs (we’re just going to pretend that last season never happened, which I’m allowed to do because it was almost like a completely different show…)
- West Wing
Ironically, this list had to exclude Better Call Saul, the show that got my thinking down this path, because it’s not yet concluded. So another list of shows with top 5 potential but are not yet concluded would include Better Call Saul, Dead to Me, and Stranger Things.
A caveat here is that there are some, by all accounts excellent, shows that I just haven’t seen: The Wire, Goodfellas, Breaking Bad.
A few other shows that were highly enjoyable end to end but not quite top 5: Battlestar Galactica (it actually hurt a bit that it didn’t make the cut, but five is five…), House, Castle, Halt and Catch Fire, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec (of course), The Office (of course), The Office UK, Marvel: Agents of Shield.
I’m not quite ready to say which of my top 5 Better Call Saul would displace. I’m pretty sure, depending on how it concludes of course, that it would do so, but it’ll take some thinking to properly order those other shows to make that happen.
Holiday Gift Guide: Bringing France to You and Others - David Lebovitz
The Case for One More Child: Why Large Families Will Save Humanity by Ross Douthat
Russell Moore top 20 books of the last 20 years.. A very aspirational reading list. I’ve read 2.5 of the titles on this list (and it’s been nearly 10 years since reading those, so they would need a revisit for sure).
As he so often does, @ayjay looks at the reality with just enough of a perspective shift that what appeared to be utter chaos becomes intelligible. This is especially appreciated considering my expression of political alienation yesterday.
The United States of America has long had a two-party political system, but it now has a two-party social system also. The social system is not divided between Republicans and Democrats but rather between Manichaeans and Humanists. The Manichaean Party is headed by Donald Trump. He works in close concert with Ibram X. Kendi, Eric Metaxas, Xavier Becerra, and Rush Limbaugh, but really, the Party wouldn’t exist at all without him. The Humanist Party, by contrast, doesn’t have an obvious leadership structure and doesn’t make a lot of noise; its chief concern is less to enforce an agenda than to make it a little harder for the Manichaeans to enforce theirs.
The Manichaeans say, all together and in a very loud voice, You are wholly with us or wholly against us! Make your decision! I don’t know when I’ve had an easier choice.
I think this perspective pairs well this this analysis by Paul Miller. My response to this at the time was it might suggest that the best voting strategy for a believer (or the humanist in Jacob’s framing) is to always vote against the incumbent in order to slow both sides in the realization of their ends.
Percent of Republicans who think that the 2020 election was illegitimate: 70%
What is challenging is that I feel like I’ve been very much formed by worldview education and Religious Right cultural education that really emphasizes political alignment as an important part of your identity because of the elevated role that national politics plays in our society. That kind of formation is really difficult right now because the people whom I would like to identify as my “tribe” are all crazy and delusional. There was plenty of talk about Trump’s election in 2016 not being legitimate, but the only poll I could find only held that 30% of democrats thought that he was not legitimately elected (and those numbers are not fully representative of “Russia hacking” delusions, but also, I presume, include people who are just ideologically opposed to the Electoral College method of election, which would at least contain agreements on the facts of the circumstance even if there was disagreement about what constitutes legitimacy.
It’s probably not just a formational circumstance that makes it so hard to deprioritize the role of politics in my thinking. I also have a personality that feels the need to gain control by seeking information and understanding about what is happening, and the path that this takes you down is generally going to lead you to a political explaination (at least at first). And then by nature, once you learn information you situate yourself in relation to that information. And then you are again building and developing an aspect of your identity that is primarily referenced toward politics.
I’m very much reminded of David Foster Wallace in “A Supposedly Fun Thing that I will Never Do Again” looking out at his fellows passengers on his cruise ship disembarking on a third world port town and just feeling embarrasment, self-consciousness, and humiliation that he belongs to the same tribe as them. But the difference is that he doesn’t really have any choice but to accept that identity even if he he’s ashamed of it. In politics you get to choose your identity. And I have for the most part. Maybe the distressing thing is actually the realization, with the synchronized spasms of insanity of the Republican party, that the political identity that I have chosen has pretty much no chance of ever holding power.
Recent Good Podcasts - Advisory Opinions
Advisory Opinions: David French and Sarah Isgur discuss recent news regarding legal matters. I’ve enjoyed David French for quite some time – his posture of recognizing and respecting the pluralistic reality of our society while insisting on the necessity of orthodox Christianity to uphold its historical beliefs and practices is, I think one that conservatives need to be much more enthusiastic about. Sarah Isgur is a new discovery for me since I’ve started keeping up with the output of The Dispatch. She’s a former Republican campaign operative (for Romney’s presidential campaign, as well as Carly Fiorina’s primary campaign) and worked for a while in Trump’s DoJ. Both are extremely engaging and have great chemistry on the show, but are also extremely knowledgable about matters of law and the Constitution, tendancies and beliefs of particular justices/judges and courts, and the interplay of law and politics. They cover a lot of complex issues and events that many news sources don’t. For example, the episode I was listening to this morning describes a case where Planned Parenthood is appealing a decision from the Texas Inspector General to withold state medicate funds on the basis of the video released 5 years or so ago that captured an administrator discussing how it essentially was selling fetal tissue. Great discussion of this case, with a lot of emphasis on the fact that this video was pretty much hand-waved away by the media at the time, but that Planned Parenthood did not dispute its autheniticy or veracity in the court case. Episodes can go a little long, but there is lots of information in them, and their enthusiasm and energy in their discussions make them pass by really quickly.
Blowing Rock NC
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Feed by MT Anderson
I just finished re-reading Feed by M.T. Anderson. I had read it first about 10 years ago, and I remember really enjoying it. I thought I would give it another go to see if it held up, and I’m pleased to say that it surpassed my memory of how good it was.
The book is set in a future in which nearly everybody has a “feed”, which is the internet embedded directly into their head. A large part of the greatness of this book is the way that the experience of this reality is conveyed by the narrator, the book’s main character, Titus. In his first-person account of the story, he constantly describes how this feels – the perfectly tailored ads that constantly flood his consciousness, the messaging by which he and his friends communicate. All aspects of the feed that he actually really enjoys and values, but as a reader you just cringe at thinking what that would be like and what impact it has on him. But then you can see how similar this is to the experience we have with our technology today. And then you go back and see that this book was written in 2002 and you cannot help but be impressed by how clearly Anderson saw the future of our technology and its impact on us.
The story features a really beautiful, quirky romance of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sort (which when done well always makes my heart do loop-de-loops). But its ending is just absolutely emotionally devastating. I remembered roughly how it ends, but for some reason I didn’t connect with it as fully when I first read it as I did this time. Something important that the book does I think is that it creates sympathy for the main character – he’s a likeable enough guy throughout the story – and then at the end it just mercilessly captures how deeply and tragically he has been hollowed out by the Feed.
All told, this is a fantastic book. Highly recommended.
There will probably be a lot of analysis in the upcoming weeks about the extent that Wokeness is responsible for the inroads that Donald Trump (of all people) has made with minority groups. Here’s a preview: most mainstream sources will largely discount that possibility, because wokeness has risen to a level of religious faith in those circles, that cannot possibly fail to produce favorable results, much less be incorrect on its face.
But even if some bold analyst goes so far as to say, “Yea, this is important, but the Democratic Party just needs to tone down the way it talks about it,” that is not going to be possible. Wokeness is too deeply rooted in a theory that posits that the “framing of the discourse” is the root of power and influence, and in that mindset to give ground in that framing is to relinquish that influence. If you have a legitmate or credibile authority to frame the discourse, you do indeed have great influence (as a college professor teaching a class for example). But what I think is unaccounted for is the fact that people don’t take too well to having that framing forced upon them by what they would see as illigitimate authorities.
Here’s the interpretation:
“Left wing” is no longer defined so much by economic status, and is defined more properly by cultural and worldview characteristics. Trump’s personality and lack of ability will lead to his failure to be re-elected, but those voters will not be not willing to give Biden the keys to the kingdom by voting for a democratic Senate. Maybe we are finally seeing the realignment toward a “culturally conservative/economically liberal” right wing and a “culturally liberal/economically conservative” left wing.
If the Republican party is smart, they will actually pass legislation that will materially benefit the working class.
I’m open to entertaining job offers from anyone who wants to pay me to think of this stuff.
This meme could stand to get wider distribution.
This is the correct take.
McConnell Played Trump gruber.micro.blog
Swing state chaos:
If Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania break for Trump, and Arizona and New Hampshire break for Biden, there is a 28 percent chance that the election “ends” with a tie.
Honor Thy Boomer
See ACB and “sexual preference “
I am grateful to Senator Sasse for finally articulating this criticism.
The line between the New York Times Trump tax return expose and the New York Post Hunter Biden emails seems pretty fuzzy from the perspective of content aggregators. I think that at the end of the day, the NYT tax return story will prove to be authentic and legitimate, and the Hunter Biden emails will be shown to be bunk. But the content aggregators aren’t quite making that claim, but are more focussed on the journalistic process and content. They justify it based on the criteria of the documents being illicitly acquired, and on it revealing personal information. I think both fo these are just as true for the New York Times tax return story as the Hunter Biden email story, and definitely create the appearance of big tech putting their thumb on the scale in favor of the Democrats.
It’s almost like the provenance of this “hard drive” is so shady that it’s just a dare for the content aggregators to suppress it, so that republicans can call foul. If they actually wanted to get it circulation they would have been a lot better off just saying that these were provided by an anonymous source.
It’s completely expected and understandable that politicians would act shocked and surprised that a judicial nominee won’t answer questions about how she would rule about particular or hypothetical cases. It’s eye-rollingly annoying when blue-check journalists on Twitter treat this as a scandal. It strikes me as monumenally unprofessional.
Obviously I need to stop checking Twitter.