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Patrick Nielsen Hayden replied to comment from Angelheaded Hipster: Of course, this maneuver can be used to attempt to derail discussion of almost anything, since there's almost always something even more morally urgent that we could theoretically be concentrating on. You know something, every year 1.8 million children die from diarrhea because they don't have access to clean water, and you're wasting time in a blog comment section chiding people for being interested in bike lanes. I don't know how you can look at yourself in the mirror.
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Because I rely on the history faculty of UC Davis for all my cultural criticism, I've been watching Life On Mars.... It took me an episode or so to figure out the structure of what's going on --it's not a mashup of a copshow and a time travel plot, so much as a mashup of a copshow and a nightmare. Getting logical about the timetravelly bit doesn't work, but not because the writers have done it badly: they've written the protagonist's reactions, and the messages he gets from the future (where he seems to be in a coma), and the reactions of people in 1973 to Tyler (largely failing to notice how very strangely he's acting) in a very effectively spooky, literally dreamlike, way. And the copshow half is great.... And of course it's got the things that make British tv generally appealing... and the Manchester accents. (I realized, watching this, that I've seen Manchester accents written out a fair amount, but hardly ever heard them. There was a bit of "So that's what 'summat' sounds like...
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I can’t make heads or tails of Sarah Palin’s analysis of her “death panels” remark in the lengthy, friendly Q&A she gave to National Review yesterday. '“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” says Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”' Which part of “evil empire” was not literal? This seems like an instance of Palin’s incessant references to Ronald Reagan leading her astray.