If we’re going fictional characters, then Havelock Vetinari from the Discworld novels.

“My daughter Murph. I keep gettin’ older. She stays the same age.”

Also, I love how he had a son who just wanted to be a farmer and that meant that Matthew McConaughey’s character was justified in being totally emotionally disinterested in him, compared to his genius daughter. Seriously, at a certain point I think Nolan forgot he wrote this guy with two kids. His entire character was defined by his relationship with his daughter. Why even give him a son in the first place?

Don’t Bother Reading

It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

You mean how he goes to see that play?

Massive spoilers for the movie, obviously, but technically Predestination:

The only truly reasonable position to have on this question is pure agnosticism: you do not and cannot know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. We could, in theory, be the only intelligent species to ever evolve in this universe. Period.

Something (almost) no one has mentioned: factory farming of livestock. I’m not gonna say a person who engages in subsistence farming shouldn’t be able to keep a coop of chickens for eggs (as long as their chickens are well cared for), but large scale animal husbandry and livestock is devastating to the environment and genuinely cruel.

Careful, son, you might cut yourself on all that edge.

Couldn’t tell the cops if the dog that bit you was a chihuahua or a pitbull? Really?

Because those are the two dog breeds that exist. Pitbull and Chihuahua. There are no others.

The number of maulings would go down even if you replaced every Golden Retriever with a chihuahua. Replacing every member of a particular breed of dog capable of mauling someone with a member of a breed incapable of it would always cause a reduction in instances. Maybe you think we should go around Old Yellering every Golden Retriever in the world, just to be safe?

The causal link is implied. When someone says “Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk,” this is another way of saying that a particular breed of dog is innately more dangerous than another. Not that it has the potential to be more dangerous, but objectively is. The only logical deduction from this statement is that there must be something about the animal’s breed that makes it this way. It’s literally the exact same logic used by people who cite FBI crime statistics in order to paint specific entire ethnic groups as innately “more criminal” than another ethnic group.

How many owners are morons that wanted cool mean dog though.

This is sort of my point. A pit bull that’s socialized, well trained, and cared for is generally very safe to be around. A pit bull that has the opposite kind of life? Well, what kinda dog wouldn’t be an asshole under those circumstances?

They’re statistically correlated with incidents of mauling. Nobody is denying the statistical correlation. But there is a difference between observing a statistical correlation between breed and maulings and asserting a causal relationship. My argument is that the assertion that “pit-bulls are innately, biologically predisposed towards violence against people and other animals” is not supported by meaningful evidence. If you are arguing that they are, then you’re gonna have to convince me with more than “insurance companies say they are.”

I mean, dog breeding is in general terribly inhumane. All dogs should ideally be mutts. They’d certainly all be healthier and have a better quality of life.

Nobody is advocating for euthanasing Pitbulls.

There are a shitload of people who advocate for completely destroying this breed of dog.

“If a big corporation says something is one way, it must be so. They have a lot of money, after all.” Your argument is peak “Argument to Authority.” I guess it’s a good thing those insurance companies like AIG were able to effectively assess their degree of risk exposure in the housing markets in 2008 and avoid collapsing when the housing market imploded. Oh, wait…

One of the things we based rates on was the breeds of dog people owned. Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk.

This is a classic example of someone observing a statistical correlation between specific factors and using that to assert a direct causal relationship between them. It implies that an insurance agency is able to 1) accurately identify every single breed of dog in every single insurance related incident (which is definitely not the case, because I doubt every insurance company is doing genetic testing on every single dog it comes across) and 2) tie a causal relationship between dog breed and incident. If I were going by typical insurance metrics, and to borrow from your analogy of “teenagers as unsafe drivers,” you would also assume that red Camarros, something more expensive to insure than your more conservative sedan, were statistically more dangerous than, say, a white Civic, as if they were what caused their drivers to get into car accidents, as opposed to young, reckless people interested in a fast sports car to simply go out and buy one. These are people who would be reckless behind the wheel of any car, but who are statistically correlated with a particular type of one. But you still mark the red Camaro as more expensive to insure regardless of who buys it because it’s statistically correlated with a higher degree of accidents.

The other user who responded to you, @[email protected], does a good job of analyzing the core idea here. To quote Benjamin Disraeli, there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics. Black people are no more “innately inclined towards criminality” than a pit-bull is innately inclined towards mauling people. Where people of color have been historically over policed, profiled by the criminal justice system, and generally set up to have a higher rate of criminal statistics than other ethnic groups, pit-bulls face similar statistical problems. Bite statistics are often self-reported by people who either witnessed a dog attack or who were themselves victims of one. Identifying a dog’s breed by sight, especially for mixed breed dogs, is nearly impossible, and more error prone than accurate. And for a pound, any “big dog with a blocky head” immediately gets labeled as a pit-bull, even if it has literally no pit-bull DNA. These dogs are routinely adopted by people who explicitly train a dog to be mean to people, as opposed to socializing them. The fact that they also have this reputation as guard dogs or attack dogs exacerbates their reputation.