“Dried up planet filled with ancient nomadic cultures and a messiah figure” is a pretty common trope in space opera. Edgar Rice Burroughs had Barsoom fifty years before Dune and even he was pulling from earlier stories. Star Wars is way closer to the Burroughs/Flash Gordon end of the sci fi spectrum than the Herbert…

As someone who has a legitimate shellfish allergy that has landed me in the hospital, I think your example shows a complete disregard for peoples’ safety and a complete lack of understand how food allergies work.

If I cant bring my box of assorted comfort snakes onto a plane then what is Sam Jackson going to rail against?!

Paddington is such a Beary Sue.

What a lovely message MRAs preach to themselves, other men, and little boys: “Women and girls are accountable for anything we do to them. Not us. We’re hapless victims of our libidos.”

Not at all.

Being a racist and dismissing women who come forward about sexual abuse /harassment are not “just differences of opinion” that women, poc, and allies need to be politely “tolerant” of. Jesus. That enabling, privileged white libertarian nihilism is part of the Trump problem.

Trying to remind someone that they have not lost all their power vs. Get Over It seems to be a major barrier in cross-generational communication at the moment. The Bari Weiss piece in the NYT was a lot of “you have power!!” and was overwhelmingly received by younger women as “Get over it.” Bari Weiss is watching a…

That’s fine. She doesn’t get to shit on other women though or be a neo-Nazi piece of shit and get a pass. We also need to stop equating victims with being weak. Which all these women seem to want to do.

Brigitte Bardot has joined the ranks of several French women who believe the #MeToo movement has gotten out of hand and depicts women as weak.

AVClub generally had the most civil, thoughtful, and amusing comments out there. Thing is, the site was about the content, with a little news, but mostly about discussions about movies and shows, old and new. And while the folks may have come from all sides of the political spectrum, we were there to commisserate on…

As a long time AVClub poster as well as Jezebel, a lot of those commenters posting on AVC are brand new shitheads that were never there when AVC was disqus. All the good and thoughtful commenters seem to have jumped ship with the change.

It isn’t natural for all classes of people to want society to be civilized, bound by reasonable laws? And how is science a middle class thing, and how is believing in science the opposite of believing in nature? This all sounds like a defence of an entrenched class or caste system anyway. If so then bring on the…

They are Disqus commenters. The old AV Club was not nearly this bad.

That was some of the most poetic pseudo-intellectual BS I’ve ever read on Jez.

Orcas have been known to try to tip ice floes with humans on them, and there have been other apparently hunger motivated incidents, but they’re not known to commonly display aggression towards humans in the wild. Captive orcas have a long history of attacking humans, but we’ve been hearing about that for years and…

There always was something aristocratic and haughty in the signatories’ letter, wasn’t there? Look how they framed the issue, in terms of “eros” and the sovereignty of the individual (even the individual men!)—rights, not values. Those are hallmarks of the aristocrat’s worldview. In retrospect, they seemed to be…

Yes, yes, Cathy, we know, we’re all such prudes for not liking sexual abuse and harassment, we should just loosen up and let ourselves be grabbed, think of the poor menz, cool girl cool girl blah blah. Heard it before. Let me know when you join the 21st century.

Fun fact! Once upon a time, the word chivalry was *only* the combat part. The part about courtly behavior, including the protocols for romance, was called gentilesse. It’s where we get the words genteel & gentleman from.

Yeah, the French have ideas on gender, which are rather baffling to Americans. I remember in the early 1990's when French Prime Minister Edith Cresson visited the US and wondered if American men are gay because nobody flirted with her. She also said that homosexuality is a much more of an Anglo-Saxon thing than a…