I guess it's kind of funny that all the characters speak in cliches and think in falsehoods, but once 9/11 does, in fact, occur, the prose does not rise to the moment and does not say anything about the experience of being in New York on that day that you couldn't have picked up from CNN
around page 290 it becomes clear that the main interest is going to be finding out which character dies in 9/11, because no one in this messy social situation is actually going to do anything to have a conflict with each other and the writing is never better than fine
The Emperor's Children (2006): If the point was to show that shallow, nasty, emotionally cramped upper-class people remain the same even in the face of History, 9/11 should have happened on page 180/400, not page 350/400
I bet it's smooth sailing in Episode 3 though, and from there on out. "Here's one where the fellas are good actually"
credit where it's due: Mad Man S01E01-02 really makes you want the entire male cast to get kicked straight in the balls
"Dubai is your reminder that ANYTHING is possible with oil money, dictatorship, and slavery, except a place that's nice to sit around in and watch people"
"worked in insurance and then played a lot of golf" and "worked in the military-industrial complex as an admin and then played a lot of golf." but on the other hand I carry on their legacy of dullness
there's a review of the audiobook that complains that the performance totally gives away what a slimy creep Murray Thwaite is. his first scene is being horny for a college student: he is the most "exposed in the #MeToo movement" literary character there could possibly be
LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL
The Economist printing lies again, must be a day ending in Y
a mandatory RT but one I RT with pleasure as well as duty
The Juggler Is Their Leader
it's a scene so bad that it makes you try to rewrite it to suit its intention. if the guy had been flashing back to the massacre itself throughout the movie, if the sight of the massacre didn't make the climax of the flashback coincide with sexual climax, *maybe* ...
this novel of social commentary on middle-class intellectuals of shortly before September 2001 would have been better if it had been written in 2010, with the knowledge that every character was economically a dead man walking
"read another book" well what if the book I read is The Emperor's Children (2006). what if I start referring to the iconoclastic but shallow liberal journalist Murray Thwaite and his struggle not to get 9/11'd
I have no intent to ever leave Massachusetts and would just like to live alone in the place of my birth without having to make $120,000 coding for a vendor that issues medical insurance rejections
“I can predict for the most part these units get bought up & rented out to a highly transient population that does not care about the overall well-being of the neighborhood or the families that put roots down here.”
- Boston City Councilor John Fitzgerald opposing new housing.
I took this screenshot a while ago for you guys
you are a weak man leading a weak party for a country whose hour of need has come, and you should step down in favor of someone who will fight for liberalism and democracy
why would you trust Donald Trump, his cabinet, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his cabinet with restoring democracy in Iran when they are overthrowing it in their own countries
LEADERS OVERTHROWING DEMOCRACY IN THEIR OWN COUNTRIES: Iranians! Rise to overthrow your tyrannous overlords!
the stuff that needs to happen to protect regular degular normal liberal democracy is gonna need to shock and horrify the other side, and if you're not promising shock and horror, go to hell
…even if & when the authoritarian movement Trump represents is out of power for a term or two. Leveraging state power to assist consolidation of media under the ownership of right wing allies is a big one.
There was a lot of talk among civil society folks between Trump terms about “tyrant-proofing” the presidency, and basically none of those reforms happened. But it looks like Trump is having much more success at doing the opposite—“freedom-proofing” the country in ways that will be very hard to undo…
Next president will have to rebuild the federal government while fighting a cadre of insane billionaires the whole way. The more bleak things get the more absurd it seems to consider electing some common weasel who wants to be president because he wants to be president
the Protagonist of Reality is of course Pete Buttigieg, a man who will be destined for the presidency until suddenly he isn't
Nabokov's novel The Gift has an incredible chapter that gives you the protagonist's satirical biography of Chernyshevsky. Ayn Rand is Chernyshevsky in reverse. it was very much still in the culture of Russian letters from all appearances
