See, I actually loathe The West Wing, and that's partly down to the fact that it may be the worst depiction of politics in any medium.

This is the second time someone has raised this in the thread, but jingoism was hardly exclusive to the suffragettes in turn-of-the-century Britain. As much as I find that the WSPU's role in obtaining female suffrage is substantially overstated at the expense of the NUWSS - which was always the larger movement, and…

True, but this is all the more reason for media depicting this issue to actually give them agency. Otherwise, they feed into the very perception that allows child conscription to continue.

Grade aside, the idea of a film about child soldiers where the children themselves are essentially "blank" back-drops to their more interesting and charismatic commander strikes me as having its priorities all wrong. If you're going to cover this topic, which is very easy to fuck up, you need to at least offer some…

Yeah, but the thing is that people only point fingers at the executives when the film turns out bad. I doubt that anyone else making a sequel to a major franchise is under any less duress or interference from the studio, but when they spin gold a la Aliens it doesn't matter. Moreover, it's somewhat naive of the…

Is it, though?

It is a harsh duty to enforce accurate depictions of Mongol society on the internet, but also an extremely unnecessary one.

The Great Yuan was not the largest empire in human history and wasn't controlled by Genghis Khan; it was founded 44 years after his death by his grandson, Kublai/Yuan Shizu.

What else are you going to base your opinion of a film's quality on other than…your opinion? You cannot quantify a qualitative assessment; 99% of people could like V for Vendetta but that wouldn't make the 1% wrong.

Honestly, if I was watching the show history-blind, I doubt my reaction would change. Latter-day Simpsons isn't bad by comparison or on a scale; its outright awful. I missed about six seasons before I revisited it recently, and it mostly just makes me cringe - not in dismay at the show's decline, but at the terrible…

Shouldn't the bar for a comedy be a little higher than "the laughs were few and far between"?

I mean, the penultimate paragraph was the reviewer praising The Simpsons as a show that is not only good on past merits but as an "ongoing concern", referring to complaints about its continual decline as "tired and unilluminating" and even saying there were "flashes" of greatness in this very season. But it sure is…

I can understand Microsoft, because no one actually uses Bing so they have to try and make it happen, but Subway is already popular.

That would be the one where he chastises Macklemore for poverty tourism while casually mentioning that he bought his 10-year-old son an iPad?

I don't really see how about seven lines about patriarchy spread over three paragraphs in a nine paragraph review constitutes excluding the merit of a show in favour of lecturing, particularly when they're relevant insofar as attacking the protagonist is an odd choice for a comedy that isn't starring Ricky Gervais.

But the sexism is the constraint, at least as far as people's enjoyment goes, so why shouldn't it be called out?

That's because it's not the premise of the show. Seriously, it's a throwaway thought in the pilot that the novel may have predicted past events (and one quickly dismissed), but the actual series has nothing to do with chasing disasters or whatever that summary implies.

I want it to turn out that "Fish Mooney" is actually just a silly adopted gangster name. Her birth name was Anne Chovie.

Though this wasn't noted in Historical Hairsplitting, Private Plane conflates the Russian Revolution (February 1917) with Russia's withdrawal from the war (March 1918) and America's entry (April 1917).

I loved DA2 for its story (characters included), but there was no denying it fell short on a technical level. As much as I appreciated that BioWare was trying to set up Kirkwall as a self-contained environment rather than repeat the map-trekking of the previous game, they totally undercut themselves at every turn. I…