Chagor and the Coin Toss

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"It's hard to find a consistent dancer given his actions throughout the movie but it does seem as if he has some view that fate is a thing," says Chagor. "He gets pushed back from karlajean at the end for this very thing what makes him toss the coin" He adds: "If the universe is random then whether this guy lives or dies should be random so he's going to let the universe decide by tossing the coin".

David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers’ bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What’s the underlying philosophy that animates Anton Chigurh? Does he have a code of any kind, or is he just a ghostly symbol of human brutality and a pitiless indifferent universe? Does he represent a new kind of evil or is Sheriff Bell just getting old? What elements, if any, in the film are more dream than reality?

And speaking of moral decline, a new Nature study claims that we have the illusory belief that people are getting worse - but can they really establish that it’s an illusion?

Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 1-8.

Mastroianni blog post about the illusion of moral decline

No Country for Old Men (movie) [wikipedia.org]