Why Trump Is a Major Party Candidate

By -
I was watching True Detective. Matthew McConaughy and Woody Harrelson had pursued a lead to a tent preacher's service. As they enter the tent, McConaughy looks around at the crowd of working class, rural, white worshippers, and then sardonically asks Harrelson, "What do you think the average IQ of this crowd is?" A way of saying, "What a bunch of morons!"

The members of the "sophisticated," urban, professional-class audience for this show are all supposed to laugh knowingly at that remark. As did the person with whom I was watching.

So I asked him, "Would you think it was funny if they entered a black Baptist church, and McConaughey made that remark?"

"No, of course not!"

"What about if they had entered a mosque, and McConaughey said that?"

"Oh... I see what you are saying."

Comments

  1. Mike B.12:45 PM

    Point taken, but keep watching. It's a great season, and the final scene -- no spoilers -- you may appreciate, whereas likely many of the "sophisticated" people who laughed at that preacher scene found it disappointing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:42 PM

      Just finished. I certainly liked it enough to get through one season in a few sick days!

      How is season 2?

      Delete
  2. Mike B.7:19 PM

    Don't have time to review it, but lower your expectations. I thought it had a lot of problems; not nearly as good as the first season.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more