The Kingsmen

Ah, thought I recognized one of the names in the credits. The Kingsmen is based on the comic book of the same name by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). Extreme, over the top violence, but as the heroes (Colin Firth plays the mentor to Taron Egerton) are quite mannerly and very rarely get their hair so much as mussed, it's easy to follow the story anyway. Samuel Jackson puts a lot of gusto into his role as the maniacal villain and Sofia Boutella plays a very deadly and acrobatic minion/lover of Jackson's.  

Conservative comedy

Good piece in The Atlantic about conservative humor and how conservatives can't seem to produce any popular comedians. One example of conservative attempts at humor kind of jumped out at me as I remembered a liberal comedian commenting on this general viewpoint just a short while ago.

“What’s the deal with Harry Reid?” [The host of The Flipside, Michael Loftus] asked in a recent episode. “You either hate him or you hate him, am I right? The man is in the business of telling people how greedy they are, and how they don’t pay their fair share, and he lives in the Ritz Carlton … This guy is literally Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.”

I immediately recalled an observation from the liberal comedian Russell Brand:

Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

Which means that conservatives like Loftus set up a “Heads I win, tails you lose” kind of situation for critics of income inequality with this “observation” on “hypocrisy.” Combine that with the comment on the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Republicans now have the Senate Majority, so Reid is now the Minority Leader), that “You either hate him or you hate him...” and we have a very sour, mean-spirited “joke” that you have to be a really, really hard-core conservative to appreciate.

On a further note, I don't recall any particular hypocrisies from Mr. Burns. I always saw Mr. Burns as just an greedy elitist who wants to rip everyone off. There may very well have been hypocrisies on his part, but I don't recall any.


Update: Rush Limbaugh gives us a marvelous example of real, genuine hypocrisy. During the time when Democrats controlled the Senate and were considering filibuster reform, Limbaugh though such a thing would be an example of evil, unmitigated tyranny. Now that the GOP is in charge of the Senate, filibuster reform is just a good, All-American thing to do.