A bit reactionary, are we?  I'd say this film is a vindication of the DS9 writing staff's vision of Trek: less utopian and thematically pure than Roddenberry's vision, but not as bland or insultingly simplistic, either.

You see this in the reference to Section 31, a Federation agency (created, again, by the DS9 staff) that is literally above the law.  Earth is a post-scarcity utopian anarchist paradise, and defending it is not an easy task.  People want to be explorers, not military officers (you can tell that Starfleet is politicized), and weapons are bad, bad things.  In this morass of gooey anarchist sentiment, Admiral Marcus does what he thinks is necessary for the survival of his people, in a creepy, insane way.  Kirk has to navigate these complicated geopolitical currents.

Come on, I love the new movies.  The NextGen spinoff world became more bland every year; it's dated.  Abrams has done a great job of reviving the genre.

If Obama did personally order that no assistance be rushed to Benghazi, we will truly have another Watergate on our hands.

The question, of course, is whether or not he did.  We sometimes forget that most federal government employees are Democratic, and sometimes I wonder if Obama's staff make decisions without him, both because the man's incompetent (Geithner was infamous for acting independently early in Obama's term for that reason) and because they don't want to tarnish "the first black president."

Though I suppose that would be a scandal in itself, if true.

There's some truth to that; social democracy is certainly more susceptible to rent-seeking and protectionism by established skilled workers, and its tradition of "pay the proles off" is something we should all fear.

You do realize that Ricochet is a "collective," as are everything from corporations to labor unions to, yes, political movements like conservatism?

Like I said, the entire point of engaging in politics is collective action.  I'd argue this is distinct from collectivism, by the way.

Do you think his sins are equal?  I've yet to hear any rumors that Obama has the same paranoid, aggrieved sense of status anxiety Nixon did.  I've been wondering about this lately; in many ways, Obama does remind me of what I've heard about Nixon.  And these new scandals do have a Nixonian vibe.

I think not.  People on the left prefer sexual excess and restrictions on soda, but many of us on the right prefer sexual restraint and unregulated food markets.

There's no particular reason why we shouldn't mix and match this way, not unless you want to eliminate democracy altogether.  The entire point of self-government is solve certain problems collectively; for many of us on the right, those problems include the moral and social breakdown that afflicts the lower classes, but not the micromanagement of decentralized markets.

To put it another way, Americans are not purists libertarians.

I don't think he is, myself.  I think this is how elites feel; they aren't particularly threatened by the left's antics and thus are more susceptible to this kind of logic.

I always thought LOTR was somewhat restrained, especially when compared to the Harry Potter film franchise.  The story does have a lot of fantastical elements, and it's not like you can avoid having lots of FX shots (they also rarely had good shooting locations, and had to tweak things a lot in post).

I must admit, I love folksy-ness.  That said, Sarah Palin did get grating after a while.

They don't mention it in the movie, but aren't Vulcans supposed to be "super-human" in a similar way to Khan (minus the regeneration, I suppose)?  It was a satisfying fight.  I love the young Spock.

I liked the Dutch angles; thought they were pretty well done in this movie.  The STII refs were hilarious, too.

Lower growth also hurts the poor and the unemployed, feeding the growth of the underclass.  I forgot to mention that.

Well.  It is true that progressive taxation is a very powerful automatic stabilizer (the most powerful one, if memory serves).  The problem is that it lowers the potential growth rate of the economy, and thus the government's tax base. 

So the economy is more stable, but growth is lower; lowered growth then leads to fiscal problems.  There's not really a net benefit.

I guess that makes sense.  I still don't entirely buy it, though.

Really?  I still don't understand how classical texts prepare one to separate truth from lies in a modern setting.