Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, and Matthew Wrather overthink Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lewis.
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Rejected Titles for this episode
- I’m Actually Not Completely Down with Bat Out Of Hell III
- Big Political Meshugaas
- Jesus And A Number of Other Pretty Good Politicians
- One Argument I’ve Had a Lot with Random Strangers on The Internet for No Reason
- Logan Shrugged
- Best Achievement in Facial Hair
- Boyfriend from Girls Was in This!
This is the NYTimes article I was referring to regarding how the filmakers filled in the gaps in the historical record regarding Lincoln’s timing of pushing for the 13th Amendment.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/steven-spielberg-historian/
Great episode guys,
However having not scene the movie, and not knowing much about the American civil war I just picked out parts I did not know with Marvel Civil war.
“There’s a chance that even if they won they would go back to registering Superheroes”
“Sentinel attacks are destroying my X-schools, and X-economy”
Marvel Civil War (MCV) narrative is almost the reverse of the American Civil War (ACV) narrative. With MCV both sides had reasonable arguments. Then one side (pro registration) was made to look unjustifiable (extra dimensional prisons, cloning norse gods, etc.)
Conversely the Confederates were actually completely unreasonable. But the narrative that most Americans are given for them is made to look justifiable (States’ rights)
I didn’t notice until this post that you post “Rejected Titles for this episode” How do guys decide this? Does Wrather abuse his powers to choose it or do you guys vote. If it’s the latter I like to think he rigs it like Lincoln did the 13th amendment
I was promised a job as postmaster of Forks, Washington, in exchange for my vote.
My attorney general tells me I have the power to declare the title in times of war. He could be wrong.
In case you’re curious, the real answer to this is that we have a chat channel we run parallel to the podcast as we record it. The main purposes of the chat channel are to post links we all need to look at, copy and paste listener feedback letters so we can all read them, have silent coversations about technical or noise issues, keep track of the time, and . . . list potential titles for the podcast.
Anyone on the chat channel for the podcast (so, any of the podcasters — we did away with a live public channel when we realized we didn’t have the technology to make UStream work) can suggest a quotation from the podcast as the title by putting it in quotation marks in the chat channel.
At the end of the call, Wrather goes back through the log from the chat channel and reads everything that was put in quotation marks. Then Matt usually states his preference and maybe we have a brief conversation about it. It’s usually pretty clear which one is going to win out, and by the time we get to it, we’re pretty tired, and of course we all get along, so nobody tends to put up too much of a fight. We have had conversations about how we pick titles, so there are usually suggestions that are fun or funny, but not the ones we would pick. Not all suggestions are serious.
Then, Wrather records the opening of the podcast with the title shortly after everything else is done.
The rejected titles are the other suggestions that were typed into our chat channel during the podcast, but which for whatever reason are not selected in the brief post-show discussion to be the title of the episode.
Here, for your amusement, are all the appearances of the word “metallurgy” in “Atlas Shrugged.” There are many!
http://www.verbalworkout.com/ub/ub110/ub11003839.htm
Interestingly (not interestingly), your example heckler would be in trouble with the Speaker at PMQ – you can say a lot of things in the House of Commons, but calling someone a liar is a major faux pas.
I disagreed with the categorization of successful compromise as being “getting 51% of what you want.” That might be the case in the very narrow context of a zero-sum negotiation, but most negotiations aren’t.
You can be successful at a negotiation that ends in compromise and still end up with the bulk of what you want – the key is that different people value things differently. If you’re Abraham Lincoln, a postmaster position is worth extremely little – it’s only real value as a bargaining chip. Of course, you don’t want to spend it lightly, but giving it up to get legislative favor is the only reason it has any value to him in the first place.
To the guy who gets the postmaster position, however, it means a livelihood; conversely, a vote on the 13th Amendment is worth relatively little to a Northern congressman who doesn’t own any slaves (but is worth a great deal to Lincoln).
A successful compromise (at least from a selfish prospective) is where both sides give up something that means little to them and a lot to the other side.
Where did the comment (I thought it was McNeil) about giving up 49% of what you want to get 51% of what you want from? I love it!
Is that you, Stan?