Macklemore's style and lyrics and presentation are just impenetrably wack-juice to me. And him doing the "big issues" thing always feels to me like pandering to cover the lack of skill, like singing gospel music at the Apollo because black folks are hesitant to boo a song about Jesus. And nice shout out to Pimp-C and…

The cut of the eye is obviously grotesque and makes me wince, but even before that, given how sensitive I get about anything getting into my eye, the idea of having someone hold my eyelids open with their fingers is very unsettling. That calm expression on her face—I swear I see a hint of a smirk—makes it that much…

He had an interesting relationship with Mariah, an interesting relationship with Harlem, an interesting (if deluded) dream, hell, even a more interesting adversarial relationship with Luke Cage. Diamondback is, as you said, simply Cage-oriented, and even then it's just "Must rage against Luke Cage!"

Agreed. Cottonmouth was a threat to Harlem with delusions of being Harlem's benefactor. He sets up a gun deal to make money to donate to his politically connected cousin, who's working on a new Harlem Renaissance. He's a local who knows the history of Harlem and thinks he's positioning himself as a golden boy at the…

Of course, this is the same guy whose big moment of being a "badass" crime kingpin involved killing three of his potential customers and alienating a fourth. Everything we've seen about Diamondback leads us to believe his empire should have crumbled about twenty minutes after he started building it.

And a villain with a stupid plan is something that can work in a story, but it's a lot harder to sell when that villain has been built up as a dreaded criminal mastermind for several episodes before his arrival, especially since we're never given a glimpse of the presumably competent version of Diamondback at work. If…

It really is bizarre. I'm sure other shows have taken similar hard turns in quality within one season as a result of a very easily avoidable mistake, but I can't think of one at the moment.

Mariah calls out something similar earlier in the season and nothing comes of it. She suggests drowning him or poisoning him, I believe, but Cottonmouth just goes for a different kind of bullet instead, and Diamondback follows suit. And of course, the cops never try to gas him or tase him or anything. So Mariah's…

Even as he became obsessed with Luke Cage, Cottonmouth's motivation for the obsession felt more personal and understandable than Diamondback's. So as he made bad decisions, you could understand why he made those decisions. And then Diamondback comes in as a cartoon character who hates Luke Cage for reasons that just…

Worse still when you rush to cram the history and bitter rivalry of said secret sibling into less than half of your 1st season.

It really proved to be a huge mistake, but at the moment it happened, it seemed like a bold, interesting choice. The problem is that Diamondback ended up being initially less interesting, then devolved into being a straight up hindrance to the show for assorted reasons. Had Mariah and Shades been the new primary…

See, sometimes I tend to agree with you and lean toward "worse" as the answer, but having grown up in the south / southwest and having encountered people who legitimately believe in this shit—be they rubes or not—I mostly come back around to it being a push. Mostly…

As Michael Jordan once put it, Republicans by sneakers too.

I can't say I actually enjoyed it, but I also had low expectations and so was surprised when it wasn't a disaster. I forget why I even went, but given it was at the Drafthouse, I'm fairly certain A) I just wanted to enjoy a few beers in the dark and B) what I actually wanted to see had already started so they wouldn't…

Well, as far as the death penalty goes, that's not really exclusive to the GOP. Hilary has defended it as recently as this campaign. (As a generally liberal person myself, my sole objection to the death penalty is practical (our justice system is fucked, so application of an irreversible punishment should be avoided),…

True. "Campaign McCain" basically sold his built up goodwill to the GOP machine in a misguided effort to win.

I'd argue that McCain wasn't worse than Bush Jr directly, but his selection of Palin sort of canceled that out. People seem to forget now, but McCain started out as the palatable GOP guy that even some liberals respected, and that had a bit of a rep (overstated though it may have been) for going against his party and…

"Manipulated by a [person] with authority in the workplace" doesn't necessarily mean you weren't still able to consent. The charges against Bill Clinton go further than that.

Yeah, "not so consensual" is close e-damn-nough to "grabbing a woman without her permission," given that "not so consensual" is probably a euphemism here. That sort of attempt at equivocation would get skewered if someone on the right tried to flip it.

Well, yeah, that was kind of my point. "Binders of women", all things considered, wasn't really much of a "scandal" at all, ultimately, nor should it have been. And the "47%" stuff was just a Republican saying in private what a lot of people who pay attention to these sort of things pretty much already assumed they…