Tonight, at last, I finally see the recent mini-series remake of The Prisoner. Will it be as libertarian — almost Randian — in tone as the original? Or will it sadden me in the same way that recent talk of making a “green technology”-themed Tom Swift movie did?
Mere hours after noting Milton Friedman’s grandson in yesterday’s entry, I watched the man himself debating school choice on an old Firing Line DVD (up against Al Shanker and other anti-choice villains). Milton could fight even bigger battles very effectively, of course (while wisely avoiding the kind of foundational philosophical arguments that draw a few people to Rand and alienate so many others, and likely always will). Here, then, a six-minute video of Milton explaining and defending free trade as a whole (pointed out by Don Boudreaux, who also praises this comedic video clip documenting what happens to a young woman when she learns free-market economics, about as accurate as that skepticism poem I linked to three days ago).
For even broader video-based education, Katherine Taylor years ago recommended to me this very brief “insanity test,” which surely any sufficiently rational, Rand-like mind should be able to endure without laughing.
The most important free-market video message of the year so far, though, may well be the trailer for the impending superhero blockbuster Iron Man 2. Watch as capitalist bad boy/hero Tony Stark tells Congress: You want my property? You can’t have it. I’ve privatized world peace.
(Amen, and this may be a real glimpse of the only way left forward for free-marketeers in pop culture: resign ourselves to playing the likable bad boys for a while, like mercenary Han Solo, but take some comfort, however problematic, in the thought that people like bad boys. Played right — especially by young actors — the characters of Atlas Shrugged might actually come across this way on-screen, especially d’Anconia. And congrats to Downey on having two bad-boy-hero franchises going at the same time, since Sherlock Holmes turned out to be surprisingly good, too.)
You know what would make Iron Man 2 the best film ever made, though? A final battle on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Think about it. This has to happen in at least one of the Avengers-related movies. I’m going to be rooting for this scene roughly every fourth time I enter a theatre for the next three years. Seeing the 90s version of the Helicarrier in the TV-movie with David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury was OK, but we need Samuel L. Jackson on the flight deck throwing someone into one of the big props, obviously.
Rand’s depiction of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged sometimes gets called utopian, but compared to actual utopian novels like the ones I looked at back in October, Galt’s Gulch is pretty plausible. For one thing, it’s small, and there’s a real history of tiny idealistic communities springing up and even faring quite well, if all or most of the participants are adherents to some sufficiently binding ethos. It’s trickier to get that sort of thing to work with a nation of 300 million people, which is why (a) you want the shared ethos — and resulting law code — of a group that large to be something fairly minimalist on which it isn’t hard to get agreement, such as, in theory, “Don’t take my stuff”; (b) we should almost always be delighted by secessionist sentiment and decentralizing tendencies, which make over-broad consensus less necessary; and (c) it’s important to keep one’s eyes open for instances of obscure, elite freedom-promoting philosophy taking on some street-level, likely dopier but nonetheless serviceable form that might actually gain some traction among the masses.
And that’s where the Tea Party movement, which celebrates the third and final day of its National Convention today, with a speech by Sarah Palin, comes in (she’s headed to work at Fox next, not a bad idea). If the movement endures, it has the potential to be a nice translator of highbrow free-market theories to a far broader audience — and if so, intellectuals should be willing to accept the fact that some nuance is always lost in the popularization/translation process.
Right in the middle of the three days of the National Tea Party Convention, as it happens, I was safely in New York City as usual but having lunch with Patri Friedman, son of David, grandson of Milton, who wants to create new nations floating in the ocean. Sounds nuts to most people (for now!) — and thus perhaps insufficiently populist — but isn’t all that weird compared to the annual Burning Man art festivals he’s attended. And I’ve mentioned repeatedly that even without having attended Burning Man myself, I feel I’ve benefited from its lesson that bizarre things you previously only wished existed can in fact be made reality, whether it’s a dance party with a flamethrower, a car covered in AstroTurf, a bodypainting orgy, or an improvised lightsaber battle involving hundreds of people, all built and then disassembled in two weeks. Compared to all that, why not have an ocean liner that offers low incorporation taxes instead of just shuffleboard?
More important, though, the realization that we, as a people, retain the right to attempt crazy shit the authorities haven’t thought of yet acts as an important mental check on what those authorities think they can get away with — and limits Read the rest of this entry »
Chris McDonald’s obvious enthusiasm for his fellow Canadians, the Ayn Rand-influenced rock band Rush, does not stop him from making some very astute, scholarly observations about the ways in which the band perfectly embodies what might be called suburban ideology. This tome does a good job of making manifest things that are almost too commonplace to be noticed, such as the regularity and comfort of late twentieth-century suburban living and the way in which a band esteemed for its unemotional dryness, technical precision, and ostensibly rootless, regionless individualist themes perfectly expresses the values of that mode of living.
Rush rocks the bourgeoisie, as I happily told ostensibly anti-bourgeois conservative Helen Rittelmeyer when she gave me the book (the most recent books I’ve given her being noirish crime novels and a book on the tragic century-ago Massachusetts molasses flood, given to me to give to her by Boston-area-dwelling Jake Harrison and Holly Caldwell, who lean more punkward than Rushward — and Rush did indeed feel threatened by the rise of punk, after all the hard work the band had done mastering precision and musicianship). Despite Rush’s emphatic embrace of modernity and capitalism, though, they are surprisingly conflicted about the predictability and blandness that these things can produce, at least as typified in their middle-class, North American, largely white surroundings. After all, the song “Subdivisions,” — which I would unashamedly argue is one of the best poems in rock history — is, despite its air of mathematical calm, as negative in its description of the suburbs as any angry punk screed (“Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone,” etc.).
Even the acceptable avenues of escape from the suburbs (to put it somewhat paradoxically) are often embarrassingly feeble (and ones well known to countless late twentieth-century nerds like me): fantasy and sci-fi, immersion in some arcane technical discipline, car rides to somewhere else, “the shopping malls,” etc. McDonald even anticipates the desperate escape gambit of conservatives of Helen’s sort: fantasizing about medieval-style aristocratic traditionalism or working-class/ethnic solidarity, things that do not come naturally to the white middle class.
Don’t get me wrong: In the end, I think the suburbs may be the greatest achievement in human history, and it is almost indecent ingratitude to lament their existence, after the millennia of toil and savagery humanity endured to be able to live in such predictable, comfortable conditions. “Subdivisions” now leaves me worried that Rush — like so many things — is in fact not capitalist and bourgeois enough (drummer-lyricist Neil Peart is quick to note that Rand is merely one of his many influences and that he Read the rest of this entry »
After last night’s punk debate (yielding a narrow defeat for the reputation of the music biz in the audience vote), I’m in the mood to hear an angry British man on stage — and luckily, magician Eric Walton alerts me to the existence of this amazing nine-minute beat poem by Tim Minchin pretty accurately summing up the mental experience of every skeptic encountering a mystic or other form of non-skeptic at a dinner party. Who says rationality can’t yield art?
Indeed, tomorrow let’s take a look at highly rational Canadians making art, namely: Rush.
You might say my overarching mission is to remind people that their aesthetic and cultural intuitions are not necessarily a good means of making snap judgments about complex topics like economics and science. Just because you hate the sight of corporate logos doesn’t mean you can conclude that everything government does to regulatorily restrict corporations will enhance the public’s welfare. Just because you hate hippies doesn’t mean you can conclude pot is a drug significantly more dangerous than scotch. Even punks, as tonight’s 8pm Debate at Lolita Bar should remind some, benefit from taking some fiscally conservative notions into account when assessing a philosophical issue.
But as long as people do make snap judgments fueled by their aesthetics, one problem with trying to tell them scare stories about government cracking down on businesses is that so many people hate business — especially big, seemingly impersonal ones like those driven to ruin by the government in Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Leftists just aren’t likely to find the industrialist characters Hank Rearden and Francisco d’Anconia sympathetic in the first place and certainly aren’t going to find them more sympathetic once the two of them engage in a gun battle with a mob of attacking union protesters, Rearden admiring d’Anconia’s gunmanship while they’re at it.
That’s a shame because the world we want to live in is precisely that in which we cheer people as they defend their property and think only secondarily of the fates of the thieving savages who assail them.
So: if you can’t wrap your mind around the idea that industrialists are people too, check out this story, whose heroes might better suit your hip sensibilities: Paul Jacob notes that Ian Schrager, a co-founder of Studio 54, says (in a Vanity Fair interview) that it was really the absurdly high cost of complying with government regulations and licenses that killed discos back circa 1980. The next time you and your knee-jerk-socialist punk buddies find yourselves complaining that the price of your concert tickets was too high, ask yourself how many more clubs there might be — and thus how much more price-reducing competition — if not for that useless, controlling, predatory buzzkiller that is the government. (Tonight’s debate, as always, is free, though.)
On this Groundhog Day, we can safely predict at least six more weeks of Obama disillusionment, even if he manages to start a war with Iran. Dan Reichwald points out a Jonathan Chait piece noting that despite attempts to spin the election of Scott Brown as if it’s not a referendum on Obama, the recent failures of multiple less-noticed Democratic candidates seem to track disillusionment with Obama pretty well.
I do not expect to see Americans rise up en masse against the government. Things simply aren’t awful enough, and at least half of them like government. And we’ll probably never see a revolt of talented industrialists like that Ayn Rand depicts in Atlas Shrugged, either, since most of our major corporations are now bland, board-run entities without principles, happy to suck at government’s teat when it boosts the bottom line and pleases short-term investors while undermining the market as a long-term system. (An economy composed of less stock-trading and more family-owned firms might have turned out differently over the past century, absent arguably-unlibertarian limited liability laws, and might have been less bubble-prone to boot, but I suppose that ship has long since sailed and that no financial-sector firm is likely to be so radical or right-thinking as to fix this problem.)
The best we can likely hope for, then — much as it might gall some — is to install another Republican Congress, this time with a clearer anti-government mandate (born of Tea Party-type fervor across the nation and a broader growing resentment of Obama overreach and underachievement). Even then, we shouldn’t expect them to create a laissez-faire paradise any more than they did in the late 90s or early 00s, but imbued with a clearer sense of mission and an acute awareness of how short the electorate’s patience has grown, they might at least block more bad initiatives from Obama.
I mention all this before more narrowly addressing Rand in order to make it clear that I am neither a Rand-like utopian (dystopian?) who thinks that “getting the philosophy right” is the important thing (and that current political calculations don’t matter) nor just a cheerleader for the GOP. Somewhere in between is that productive middle ground where ideology nudges the public (or the media types who in turn nudge the public), the public nudges at least one consequential political party, and that party then serves some sort of useful strategic purpose, even if only by way of limiting the damage the state continues to do. A starry-eyed optimist I am not. (Neither is Ted Balaker, who created this forty-two-second Reason parody of Obama-as-job-creator, by the way.)
This Wednesday, Feb. 3 at 8pm, an ex-Misfits vs. ex-Misfits (conservative!) punk-rock smackdown:
•Bobby Steele of the Undead argues YES.
•Michale Graves argues NO.
•Michel Evanchik (token Democrat) moderates and Todd Seavey hosts. Our debate last month was about “noshing,” this time it’s about “moshing” — so join us!
Voting on the question at the end: you, the unwashed mosh pit of democracy.
Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.
This week also sees the start of this blog’s “Month of Ayn Rand,” and I think it’s worth noting that even people with similar political principles can disagree about the proper relationship between art and business. The plot of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, after all, was basically the classic left-wing story of an idealistic artist resisting the pressures of the marketplace. And come to think of it, the Fountainheads would be a great name for an Objectivist band, if it isn’t already (more about the one highly-famous Objectivist band, Rush, later in the month).
Here, too, is a reminder from J.R. Taylor that not all punk is conventionally leftist. We may yet live to see “conservatism for punks” become a popular philosophy. Talking about it at the bar on Wednesday can’t hurt.
You know, a libertarian novelist friend of mine is visiting the City, and it’s sort of amusing timing, since tomorrow sees the start of my “Month of Ayn Rand.” The friend is arty and subtle; Rand, notoriously, was not. My friend will probably have to spend a substantial portion of her life saying “but not like Ayn Rand.”
But as I’ll explain in more detail in February, I think people sometimes judge Rand too harshly not only philosophically but in the aesthetics department as well. Consider, after all, the several factors she was attempting to juggle in writing Atlas Shrugged: novel as extended philosophical argument, novel as depiction of an entire economy, novel as broad array of socially-intertwined characters in (unsurprisingly, given her childhood) a rather Russian fashion, and perhaps novel as an attempt (by an awed immigrant) to capture the broad-strokes romanticism she’d seen in the Hollywood movies that drew her to America. Atlas could have turned out a lot stiffer than it did, really.
And as a reminder that even some very fondly remembered Hollywood films are not exactly works of subtlety, here’s a video montage of “The 100 Cheesiest Film Quotes” — don’t be shocked if some of your favorite films are in there (NOTE: This is unrelated to parody lounge singer Richard Cheese’s offer of free CDs to troops, which he dubs Operation: Cheesey Freedom).
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You’ll see at least one scene from Attack of the Clones in there, and if the past eleven years have numbed the childhood-destroying pain of Phantom Menace enough, maybe you can take some pleasure from a series of videos wittily — but quite accurately and devastatingly — explaining why Phantom Menace was a manifestly awful film that cannot hold a candle to the simple but effective movie-making of which George Lucas was capable a decade and a half earlier. The first installment contrasts the strong characters of the 70s/80s films with — well, the crap from the 90s/00s that we’re still bitter about. My thanks to Paul Taylor and Scott Nybakken for pointing out the critical videos, even with all the pain and anger they bring back.
Writer and radio commentator John Hodgman poignantly admitted Read the rest of this entry »
I was always the sort of nerd who, once he decided he liked some TV show, saw every episode and remembered all the plotlines — thus, too, my musings on comic book continuity in more than one entry on this blog over the past three years.
At some point in the past few years, though, I started to realize, in a tragic irony worthy of a Twilight Zone episode, that while Hollywood’s been taken over by nerds who think like me, I’m getting too burned-out on protracted obsessive-nerd drama to keep consuming the stuff. I think in some ways it was X-Files that broke me, eight years ago: a glorious, nine-season-long pole vault straight into a brick wall. Pointless. And don’t get me started on that terrible second movie again.
So now, when I see, for example, Julian Sanchez write with enthusiasm about how Fringe is designed to be watched with TiVo so that you can slo-mo certain clues that hint at what the next episode’s about, or I hear that the plot of Battlestar Galactica changes before your eyes if you Twitter about it while using a secret decoder ring (the latter I made up), it just sort of makes me tired. I’m sure it’s all cool, but I just don’t know if I have the energy — the naive optimism, really — to ever again dive into multiple seasons of something that “works 400 times as well if you follow it for the whole five years” (much as I will always love Babylon 5, don’t get me wrong — or at least the first four seasons).
For a long time, I thought I’d catch up on all this stuff on DVD, which also sounds great in principle, but then the creeping mathematical awareness dawns that I can’t imagine cramming, say, three whole days into my schedule to watch Arrested Development. I may yet watch the David Tenant Doctor Who. We’ll see. Watching a season of 24 in twenty-four hours still sounds like a good performance art idea, but I wouldn’t want to bet I’ll get around to it (naturally, one would have to press play at the time seen in the timecode on-screen, for maximum effect). I saw a few seasons the normal way.
In conclusion, I’m sure Lost has been good and that this coming Tuesday’s season-six premiere will bring joy to many people — but watching this eight-minute summary of the first five seasons sort of makes me want to lie down, as Scott Nybakken once said of the high-spirited posters for the musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk.
Let’s do a weekend of entertainment-related notes before starting my “Month of Ayn Rand” on Monday:
The alien abduction movie Fourth Kind is a good example of the bad things a culture produces when people care more about whether claims are interesting than whether they are true. Since Fourth Kind is, in truth, a monumental fraud — fiction trying very hard to attract attention and ticket sales by pretending rather convincingly to be a documentary with no obvious “wink” to the audience — I would not be troubled by, say, a class action suit aimed at getting moviegoers’ money back. Nothing unlibertarian about saying so, either: fraud should be legally punished. (Ideally, even everyday non-business lies ought to be legally actionable, I’d say, if you accept the logic behind punishing fraud and are able to come up with reasonable assessments of damage.)
I was pleased, then, to see these two paragraphs in the Wikipedia entry for Fourth Kind, which hint that at least some small pressure may have been brought to bear on Fourth Kind by people caught up in its lies:
On November 12, 2009 Universal Pictures agreed to a $20,000 settlement with the Alaska Press Club “to settle complaints about fake news archives used to promote the movie.” Universal acknowledged that they created fake online news articles and obituaries to make it appear that the movie had a basis in real events.
On November 13th, 2009 by WorstPreviews.com Staff: “Universal Pictures has just reached out to us to let us know that the studio was not sued and the money was just a contribution Universal made to the Alaska Press Club. The contribution was not a result of any lawsuit.”
On a far less sinister note, how do we rate this costume from the new Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand for historical accuracy? Any historians want to weigh in?
This has been a pivotal week in my relationship with a loved one: I mean, of course, Fox News. I will have appeared briefly on their spin-off Fox Business Network twice, the second time in just over an hour, as I type this, since I’ll be seen defending Twinkie consumption at the very end of the 8pm Eastern Stossel broadcast, in my capacity as American Council on Science and Health staffer and Audience Guy.
Last night, by contrast, I was visible in Stossel’s studio before and after Obama’s State of the Union, joking about the fact that we’ve reached the point where math is apparently considered irrelevant for government spending purposes. With a $12 trillion debt and a couple trillion more in “stimulus” spending, I asked, why not spend quadrillions or septivigitillions (the latter, as I only now recall, being a word, likely misspelled here, that I think I got from H.P. Lovecraft’s hyperbolic descriptions of how old the Outer Gods are or something like that)? Then, being more serious, I suggested abolishing Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the military if we want to get serious about debt reduction (hey, we’d still have the state governments, remember, so don’t say it’s all that radical).
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I was pleased to discover that seated near me in the front row of the non-randomized Stossel audience were fellow libertarians Nick Gillespie and David Boaz, and we spoke briefly about a very different video production I’m rather excited about: the new documentary from the director of An Inconvenient Truth. Astonishingly, his upcoming Waiting for Superman, about public education, apparently does not hew to the leftist party line but rather exposes the way in which teachers unions, probably the most sinister force in domestic politics, systematically and deliberately block innovations such as magnet schools that might help students but weaken unionized teachers’ bargaining power and bureaucratic authority. When Woody Allen’s Sleeper suggested that mid-century teachers union leader Al Shanker destroyed civilization, he wasn’t too far wrong.
Already, the leftists are complaining about Waiting for Superman.
And speaking of waiting for Superman, I’m pleased that due to a programming delay, I Read the rest of this entry »
I’m pleased Jen Dziura is devoting this week on her blog to wordplay inspired by my favorite childhood sci-fi character, Tom Swift, boy industrialist. Jen, one of the most entrepreneurial liberals I know and a dweller in the Wall Street area, also e-mails a link to this Keynes vs. Hayek rap Russ Roberts co-created — which is quite good, though it’s also a bittersweet reminder that the really important insights in life do not necessarily work well as short slogans.
You can’t blame the masses for wanting a pithy Bible verse or a political chant instead — but that doesn’t make the masses correct, unfortunately. Reality never promised you these things would be easy — or poetical (speaking of which, anyone have a job for a young history-minded libertarian econ prof from Italy, since I know one who may be seeking a new gig?). Sadly, points out Scott Nybakken, you can even sense from listening to the rap — despite the fact that libertarians made it — how much easier it is to get Keynes’s erroneous views across in this form than it is to explain Hayek’s take on Austrian economics. Sigh. Maybe I need to make more use of my years-ago experience in advertising to turn all this free-market stuff into usable bumper stickers.
Somewhere in between slogan and complexity lies Atlas Shrugged, and if that seems like a good balance to you — or at least a worthy topic of conversation — you’ll have to keep reading this blog during its “Month of Ayn Rand,” which begins next week and will include everything from the band Rush to a little bit of performance art by me at Yale, if all goes as planned.
As a prelude, remember to check out tonight’s Stossel-hosted town hall with me in the audience, probably voicing an opinion (8pm Eastern until 11pm or so, with Obama’s State of the Union and presumably the GOP response heard in the middle) — not to mention my “Twinkie defense,” no disrespect meant to Harvey Milk, at the end of tomorrow’s regular 8pm Stossel broadcast.
David Boaz, to whom many libertarians like me owe a great deal, announces he’s written a report with David Kirby about what portion of the voting public is libertarian or near-libertarian (not nearly enough but more than you might think). The executive summary is here and the full PDF here.
Boaz notes that some 14% of the electorate may qualify (and that the number goes as high as 59% according to Zogby if you simply use a broad “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” test) and admonishes that this is enough to swing elections. An observation about swingers gleaned from Ramesh Ponnuru, though: as Boaz notes, libertarians were moving away from Bush in 2004 and toward McCain in 2008, but in each case the general public seemed to move in the opposite direction — so maybe self-interested politicians should flee the libertarian embrace.
It seems fair to say, though, that there are times when libertarians capture the zeitgeist and times when they don’t, with 2010 possibly being a time when libertarians, Republicans, and fed-up Tea Partying members of the general public are all on the same anti-government page. Boaz and Kirby hope that’s the case (and that Scott Brown’s elections is evidence) and that we’ve gotten past the point when, as they put it four years ago, “Social conservatives have evangelical churches, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family…Liberals have unions…Libertarians [only] have think tanks.”
I think anytime the public is focused on government-as-a-whole, it’s good for libertarians and fiscal conservatives. Government, looked at with even the slightest awareness of economics, is manifestly a predatory and almost uniformly socially-destructive force, but in relatively comfortable times, people are lulled into paying attention to only their favorite bits of government — whether healthcare provision, welfare to favored groups, or trash collection — and forget that the entire institution is the most massive of net losses for us all, worth opposing on all fronts.
And if you want a glimpse of what a libertarian-led chunk of the electorate might look like in a televised town hall meeting responding to a presidential State of the Union address, look no farther than Fox Business Channel, this Wednesday starting at 8pm Eastern, hosted by John Stossel — during which, prior to and/or after Obama’s speech, you’ll likely see me weighing in from the audience (and speaking of weight, catch me defending Twinkies in the final minute of the regular Stossel broadcast the very next night, Thursday, shown at 8pm and again at 11pm, if you aren’t completely sick of my Audience Guy character by then).
Actor Ernest Borgnine turned ninety-three yesterday. From the Poseidon to Airwolf, the freaky-visaged actor has served us well. Last year, at ninety-two, he starred in the film Another Harvest Moon.
This reminds me, though, of a likely injustice: Years ago, when my friend Ali Kokmen was in the habit of leading several of us to a West Village bar for Bingo, that bar also had such contests as inviting people to imagine the best possible title for an Ernest Borgnine comeback project. Ali suggested Ernest: Deep Borg Nine.
And here’s the thing: I contend that Ernest: Deep Borg Nine — which puns not only on (a) Borgnine’s name but simultaneously on a Star Trek (b) title, (c) race, and (d) female character (e) known for being considerably better looking than Ernest Borgnine — is the best Borgnine comeback project joke title logically possible.
We never found out who won the contest or what their title was, but it wasn’t Ali — and even without knowing who won, I call shenanigans on this no doubt unjust verdict, and not just because Ali is one of the finest men who ever lived, and a noble Bingo team leader to boot. A curse be upon anyone who would rob him of his rightful joke-contest glory, Bingo winnings, or margarita money.
On the bright side, one of those Bingo outings was the site of one of my musical-good-ear detective triumphs. I can often guess from listening that, say, No Doubt has some connection to the Cars and that sort of thing — and I first heard the band Television on one of those Bingo outings, guessing it was them based solely on the fact that it sounded like an authentically proto-punk 70s band and there simply weren’t that many of them, so by process of elimination… And that’s how I first heard what indeed turned out to be the excellent album Marquee Moon.
In grimmer entertainment news, I see the trial of the suspected murderer of former Ramones manager Linda Stein is set to begin today (not to be confused with the trial for murder of former Ramones producer Phil Spector). Rest assured the suspect is not invited to our Debate at Lolita Bar next week (Feb. 3) between ex-Misfits members Bobby Steele and Michale Graves. Perhaps, though, since the accused was an employee of Stein, we should mention the case at our planned April debate on the question “Are Bosses Usually Jerks?”
