Cool.

The "Great PC Wars"? Jesus. Yes, by all means, let's take the problem of negotiating a culturally sensitive approach to comedy that still lets comics explore taboo subjects without fear of being silenced, and reduce it to an imaginary war scenario where each side can 'claim' unwitting celebrities as champions of their…

That's fair. I don't agree with that episode's use of 'fag' - even if I did at the time - but the episode in question is almost a decade old now, and it's possible for people to change their minds.

I think we probably have two somewhat different impressions of the PC scene anno 2015. In my own experience, the PC Bro demographic (if that’s what we’re calling the toxic elements of Social Justice activism) aren’t a negligible minority, but a substantial and quite vocal one. Perhaps not the majority activists, but a…

But do you really think the point of the episode was to say "Hey, stop being critical of dominant culture?"

Hah. Which paper, out of curiosity?

There are similarities in the rest of the song, but not objectionable ones, IMO. It's only the chorus and its vocal melody that's lifted more or less directly from it. And the chorus is the centrepiece of a pop song - the unique selling point, in advertising terms. It's what songwriters make their money on.

Yeah exactly. It's a tough thing to convey to people who don't 'hear' music analytically. And I don't mean that in a smug, patronizing way at all. I can't tell the difference between good and bad wine, let alone what 'notes' it's supposed to conjure when I drink it. But people who work with wine on a daily basis can.…

I don't know if you're a musician or not but it's actually a lot more than just saying the same amount of words similarly. It's that if the songs are played in the same key, the note for each word is identical, played over identical chords.

The reason why Tom Petty could take Sam Smith to court was because the VOCAL MELODY was the same. Not the chord arrangement. The fact that two separate vocal melodies can be sung over the the same (or similar) four chords is not even remotely close to having the kind of resemblance Smith/Petty does.

Sorry, did I miss the part where this article makes an argument for the movie's form being racist? And that you can't disentangle it from from narrative? The author here seems to slowly conflate and reduce 'form' to a broad 'visual aesthetics' so it can subsume Lillian Gish's visually striking whiteness into evidence…

If the AV Club were reviewing potato chips they'd still find some way to work in an excoriating line about Aaron Sorkin, I'm sure.

No, I said if she is a strawman, then she can't also be an edifying character - one whose arguments we're supposed to agree with. So if she's a strawman, and Don is Sorkin by proxy throughout, then her arguments must be wrong.

No, I'm astonished that your reading of the scene seems to view her as a strawman entirely because "ugh, Aaron Sorkin". In spite of actual textual evidence in the scene.

The idea that a scene can have shifting sympathies with regards to different subject matters (Don for the realities of an exploitative confrontational TV platform; Mary for the realities of, you know, rape) isn’t ‘cherrypicking’. It’s supposing that drama can contain nuance. Your reading necessitates an interpretation…

I don’t agree at all. Mary doesn’t make the wrong choice. She makes the right choice in a wrong world. I also can’t fathom how anyone can look at that scene and come away with doubt about whether Mary was actually raped or not. Don’s obligation to presume innocence is entirely cerebral – there is nothing in the scene…

How do you see that he ultimately favors Don and criticizes Mary for not agreeing with him? I've watched the scene a few times now, and while I think Sorkin agrees with Don's request for her not to appear on ACN's confrontational style debate (because it will be sport), I think morally the show sides with Mary. The…

I think the issue I take with 'mansplaining' is it's often thrown into an argument as an empty buzzword. For something to be mansplaining - as opposed to a character who happens to be male explaining something to a character who happens to be female - you'd need to convincingly show that the character presumes…

Exactly. Libby's analysis seems pretty unsophisticated, to be honest. If anything, I came away with the impression that the accuser is in the right. That that's where Sorkin's sympathies lie. But he laments the state of the populist media where any venue offered to rape accusers inevitably becomes an arena for…

Obviously Sorkin has been taking pot shots at the kind of 'journalism' that Libby Hill thinks is 'the future' (citizen journalism, First-person journalism, snarky gossip columns etc.) but man is there something really apt about how the new media apologist on the show kept using the word 'immediacy' as a euphemism for…