sharklasers

A modest counter-example imho is Malcolm in the Middle. Even the city didn't look clean. There were surprisingly concrete effects of poverty in that show.

Imho this is one of the best non-David-Wong episodes so far.

About the Monty Hall problem, they mention regret over changing one's mind and then finding out that the first door was the right one all along, along the lines of "Should have trusted your gut instinct". However, that impulse is not useless! In multiple choice tests, it is very important to learn to trust your initial instinct. Every medical student and prof will tell you that if you go back and second-guess your answers, it is far more likely that the initial answer you gave was indeed the correct one. The real intuition problem with the Monty Hall problem is that the first door was chosen more or less randomly, not because of prior knowledge or distinguishing features.

I think the main reason that the mainstream media suddenly warmed to the idea of gay marriage after 2008 is the economic crash. Gay marriage and also stuff like cannabis legalization are offered to us as ersatz issues, to distract from the real issues concerning climate catastrophe and runaway inequality.

Regarding European Americans (otherwise known as "Americans") being cut off from their European heritage, the guys overlooked how it is Americans more than anyone else who constantly run around stressing their particular European heritage (Doug Stanhope had a bit about Americans always saying "I'm an Irish American", putting that on their Facebook page etc). European Europeans never do that, and neither do African Americans (as Patrice O'Neal said, "I'm not going over there, fighting some silly war wearing sweater pants and slippers"). It's almost as if Black Americans overtook White Americans when the civil rights movement took off. They acknowledged the fact that they can't go back and neither can they fully assimilate. That's what the X in Malcolm X's name stood for.

In the context of The Walking Dead, there should've been at least an honorary mention of Battlestar Galactica since it utterly failed in similar ways (Cylons like Zombies never going away / the show never really addressing the truly interesting questions of how humans organize post-civilization life).

I kept waiting for them to mention The Act of Killing, which is about a truly shocking way in which reality was based on movies.

If Jack is interested in thinking about movies in terms of the collective unconscious, he should look into Slavoj Zizek's ideas.

I recently rewatched The Matrix, and for me it didn't hold up at all due to the issues mentioned. The Wachowskis just don't seem to ever have had a firm grasp of their own mythology or its possibilities, even less than e.g. George Lucas had on his. About a decade ago, I rewrote Matrix in my head. In my version, Neo and Trinity (although I'd rename all the characters (and replace all the actors)) were linked through an "origin accident", possibly a simple wiring error in the Matrix. So "Neo" would wake up outside as "Trinity", and then meet himself (i.e. the person who is "Trinity" inside the Matrix). It would give a wonderful spin to lines that are actually in the movie, e.g. when they meet for the first time in the club and he says "I thought you were a guy". Or at the end of the film, instead of Morpheus saying "He's the one", he might say "They are one". Plus, years after I did this re-imagining of the film, I read that one of the Wachowskis had actually undergone sex change, which made it almost weird that they didn't think of that twist, if only in some draft.