I really don't find anything particularly objectionable about the points you've made about either issue, and feel we're basically at cross purposes. I'm arguing from a point of preference and the principles on which that preference is based, where you seem to be arguing from a more objective, even historicist vantage…

I'm not saying that people worrying about appearances is unique, I'm saying that now — in the post that I was responding to in the first place, for example — people treat it as an overt interest unto itself, without any self-awareness of the fact. That's where the dissonance is. Truth used to be the principle — even…

What a wimp. I admitted that my annoyance went too far in implicating Patinkin, if that's not good enough for you then indeed, do piss off.

I see what you mean — fair enough.

Your definition is certainly plausible, though I don't think my own — where a gesture, whether active or discursive, is meant primarily to show one's moral standing and thereby ensure one's status in a given group — is "ridiculous." In all honesty I actually like Patinkin as an actor, and don't think he necessarily…

Yes, I think I understand your opinion now. Please don't try to engage with me again.

Nowhere did I imply that lesbians were less than men, only that men who resembled them probably were. As far as my inability to behave nicely or empathetically, I'll let the not very delicious irony of your post speak for itself.

Any fair minded person would see that I was merely attempting to trigger you after you self-triggered over what was originally a fairly innocuous comment. I wanted you lose these moments of precious life to your own rank and unwarranted outrage. You deserve it. You've been disagreeably aggressive from the get-go.

Please, control your emotions — one needn't become an unnecessary prick just because one holds different views. It's the racial implication rather than collegial element that I am remarking upon.

I'd like to point out that I was merely commenting on the substance of the article when you embarked on this lesbianic tirade. Of course, people can decide for themselves who the "prick" is in this scenario.

You make fair points, but it remains an example of what happens when you cast the performance of what might otherwise be a work of art based on the same corporate diversity standards as the cover photograph of a first year Sociology textbook.

The game has at least changed insofar as people might at one time have at least disguised their fatuous intellectual preference for the fluidity of appearances over the stability of truth. We are now at a point where a white man following a black man in a job is necessarily — or at least optically — a "dog whistle" or…

Sure it is: he obviously wanted the job, he detected a schoolmarmish backlash on social media, then he retreated with a mealy-mouthed half-apology and gesture of solidarity. It's textbook.

This isn't saying much — all pricks are unnecessary to people like you.

I wish people would stop basing their judgements on the externalized bad conscience that is "optics." It's really starting to carry an Orwellian connotation.

This is virtue signalling at its most banal.

That was very funny acting.

Plus she called Naz to the stand, which everybody involved — including we viewers — knew was stupid. Naz, with his shaved head and tattoos, his history of drug dealing and violence, as well as having only ever expressed the adamance of his refusal to believe that he was capable of doing what he actually had no memory…

"This isn’t necessarily a cardinal sin, but The Night Of is already built around the brutal murder of a woman who must inherently be treated like an object thereafter, so it’s hard to cut the show all that much slack for Chandra’s odd fate."

I think Naz's mother storming out of the courtroom, asking "did I raise an animal," joined with her (seemingly) intentional refusal to take his call, implies a greater degree of condemnation on her part than a merely gentle expression of culturally-specific hurt.