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Yes, specifically talking just about the Loop - i.e. where all the skyscrapers, financial district, most major corporate offices, etc are. Lightfoot raised all but one of the bridges and basically cut it off during the height of George Floyd. It's bordered on two sides by the river and one by...

Gus being a supreme bootlicker aside, what's really interesting about these special units is how they tie into two prominent law enforcement trends: militarization and systemic racial bias, both of which are about viewing the populace as an enemy rather than the people you serve. Let's be...

Let's review. You, a person who notoriously attacks the idea of systemic racism in policing at every turn, offered an "intuition", based on zero evidence, that suggests problems with special police units are not systemic but the fault of "bad eggs". When challenged to provide literally any...

Essentially there is a wealth of evidence that if you give cops the power to kick in doors and bust heads with little oversight, they usually end up becoming criminals themselves, robbing drug dealers/dealing themselves, beating and/or extorting suspects, etc

I'd love to see you or anyone point to any of these nominally elite anti-gang/drug/violent crime special units that have done "really high quality police work", because the list of corrupt and brutal shitshows is long: -CRASH in L.A. -NYPD's Street Crimes Unit -Special Operations Section aka...

Actually if anyone wants a totally unreserved recommendation for a dark Irish dramedy written by a McDonagh and starring Brendan Gleeson, go watch Calvary, by Martin's older brother John (who seems, on evidence, the superior McDonagh). I haven't seen their earlier film together, The Guard, but...

Surely even stereotypical tiny village Ireland has been done better by numerous filmmakers. Waking Ned Devine immediately comes to mind or possibly even some of the Doyle Barrytown films if you take them as an urban village of sorts. I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of our resident Irish...

Haven't watched In Bruges in awhile from memory I suspect it holds up

I also recently saw Banshees, or tbf I gave up halfway thru bc I thought it was boring and unfunny. Probably the last I'll spend time on a McDonagh project. I said the same thing after Three Billboards - possibly the most clueless European take on America I've ever seen, which as you all would...

it's both an interesting and important question that I feel like I can take a stab at, at least in a historical sense tldr: hubris and ignorance I think the basic answer isn't that the neocon clique didn't care - it's that they legitimately thought they would go in and topple Saddam and Iraqis...

that's incorrect tho. linebaugh and I are in Chicago, hundreds of miles from the nearest Canadian border. gus is, I believe, in Wisconsin somewhere, a bit closer but still quite far.

I heard a recent James Cameron interview in which 1) he, no surprise, says that the $ people wanted him to take the "hippie treehugging bullshit" out of Avatar and he had to fight hard to keep it in, and more interesting 2) after Avatar he'd decided to retire from filmmaking to focus on...

smelling salts before lifting: definitely a thing. pretty exclusively a powerlifter/strongman thing for moving extremely heavy weights. never tried them, dunno anything about their efficacy/lack thereof. weed or anything other drug "making you gay": definitely not a thing. as @version said...

it should be said that the continued existence of archaic nonsense like the House of Lords and hereditary titles is unhelpful in trying to escape that image of England as frozen in history. granted that kind of quaintness is still significantly better PR-wise than the vast and sordid doings of...

The real common American mass culture misconceptions about England are probably more of Victorian/Edwardian-era stiff upper lip aristocrats a la Downton Abbey, Dickensian chimneysweeps saying "guvnor", terrible food (that one's true?), tea + crumpets, general formality, stiffness, and so on. I'd...

Absolutely true. There's a pretty good joke about this in In the Loop. But is that one even unique to Americans? I guess - and granted I don't have evidence either way - that most people outside of the UK, current/former Commonwealth countries, and possibly Western Europe have the same...

Oh one more thing I'd like to see any evidence that any of these people are strongly influenced by James C. Scott, who I'm very familiar with. Because there is zero indication of it in their own literature.

There's a ton more that could be said about strong longtermism, how fucked up it is and the multiple deeply flawed assumptions (i.e. what shapes the population ethics math) it rests on, but that's a decent start So there you go: a tiny clique of philosopher-kings seeking to optimize their...

What it really minds me is the advent of neoliberalism. The Mont Pelerin founders realized similarly that many of their ideas would be unpalatable to the public so they sought, like slt, to bypass the public and go directly to the levers of power via founding think tanks and academia. They then...

The Vox article in particular does a good job of distinguishing between weak and strong longtermism. Let's call them wlt and slt for convenience. Wlt, as it says, basically just anyone concerned with the future beyond the short to medium term. Climate Extinction etc would certainly qualify. So...