Well put.  Thank you for these thoughtful comments.

That’s not exactly what’s going on with Mackey’s comments. If you give ANY credence to ANYTHING this man says, he will go only as far as “It’s ‘cause yer fat, hurr hurr hurr,” and that is where he will stop.

Preach! Thank you for your moment of sane, deliberative, realism-based commentary.

Didn’t Oscar Wilde make some comment to the effect that Wagner was a real popular ticket because the orchestra was so loud nobody cared if you spent the entire performance visiting with your buddies?

Oh, I think ol’ drunken racist homophobe bigot-for-pay Joe woulda been face-first and waistband-deep in the trough like the rest of them.

That is a GREAT idea! Thank you, you have given me the impetus to demand that minifig makers and DMs incorporate cow-catchers as a possible mod for any wheelchair!

I believe you’re right; it’s a movie that is so utterly rooted in its time that it’s difficult to go back and pick out the individual influences. There are numerous aspects to this, but I always saw this movie as a vigorous attempt, inspired by the feminist movement, to challenge and broaden the then-common definition…

I think you’re on to something here. Julia Phillips, in “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again”, talks about how Spielberg’s marriage to Amy Irving was cracking apart while he was making “Close Encounters”. He complained to Phillips that Irving was convinced he was having an affair, and asked, “How can I tell her…

Thank you for this! Charlotte doesn’t get nearly the idolization she deserves.

I used to think you’d have to get a stadiumful of conservatives for the collective IQ to crack 100 points, but I don’t think that any more. It’s a choice. There’s a great concept I read about somewhere eons ago that covers this: it’s called “learning to manipulate the symbol set”. Once you achieve mastery over the…

This-is-just-an-opinion alert, but I have this vague idea that this is connected to the different approaches to international action practiced by the two major superpowers after World War II. It’s a shameless generalization, but here goes: the wealthy U.S. went for space travel, sophisticated medicine, national…

I believe you have hit upon the very thing. Trope awareness being common now, you’re just not going to get away with The Predatory Lesbian (TM) in 2020 the way you could in 1938. I mean, good, that’s a terrible, false image that has caused untold amounts of damage to innocent people, and it should rightly be consigned…

I wonder if they could have gotten away with Stephen Fry. Even in a pitch session.

It would end up like it did in HBO’s “Watchmen”. There are some indefensible dreams better left as indefensible dreams. And GODDAMNED CLAIMING OWNERSHIP OVER OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU UNMITIGATED MONSTER is one of them.

I’m wondering if this isn’t another instance of longing for what we might stereotypically refer to, in the absence of a better term, as street cred: the notion that the well-heeled so often have that their success should be regarded not as an accident of privilege, but as the result of their own scrappy, incessant…

I agree with you. White supremacists will weaponize this, as always, and anyone who isn’t a white supremacist will be in the horrible position of having to decide whether and how to respond.

It’s an understandable temptation, but impossibly to justify. I have a friend who claimed for decades to be part Cherokee. (To her credit, she never used it to claim tribal affiliation for monetary benefit, she just practiced what she thought were Cherokee rituals and, like, hung out at Cherokee art museums and stuff.)…

Every word from Ms. Ward is a glimmering glimpse into divinity.

This has been on an endless loop in my head for two days now.

You may be on to something here; this sounds exceptionally plausible.