You’re mixing the two laws up. The “THIS IS FAKE” disclaimer only applies to the “deepfakes of politicians” law. The non-consensual porn law actually explicitly says that a “THIS IS FAKE” disclaimer doesn’t make it okay:

“(d) It shall not be a defense to an action under this section that there is a disclaimer included…

I dunno, I think Shakespeare is a pretty clear “both high art and cheap pop” situation.  You could also argue Dickens or Twain, the Marx Brothers or Chaplin, the Beatles, etc.  I do think The Godfather is a great example of that impulse, though, and I think it’s right to suggest that the phenomenon became a lot more…

Everything but the last season (and I guess the movie) is on Hulu.

Mondoweiss shouldn’t be in that image at the top of the article - it’s a legitimate news and opinion site. I mean, it has extremely strong opinions about Israel/Palestine, but they’re written by actual journalists - they’re not just clickbait or scams or whatever.

Sh*t My Kevin Says

Ruth and Sam both blamed “desert pollen” for their actions, and the show treated it like it was a fake excuse. But Las Vegas actually does have a lot of pollen in the spring. It comes from mulberry trees, which were planted in large numbers in the 70s and 80s because they don’t need very much water. The pollen was so…

This is a really minor thing, but they retconned a continuity issue! Specifically, in the first season Diane says that she was named after Diane from Cheers (which makes sense because her family is from Boston and she was a nerd who very strongly didn’t fit in). But then in the second season (2015) Mr. Peanutbutter…

I guess you could read it that way.  To me it read more as “she’s an aristocrat so she’s required to marry for family reasons” - like I definitely think Derek will be in the same position in a few years (except he’s less reflexively independent than Bean so maybe not).  But even reading that as a gendered problem, I…

Rebooting regular Janet a bunch of times gave her new capabilities, including the ability to convincingly pretend to be Bad Janet.  Maybe Shawn and company just copied that strategy in reverse?

(BTW where is Vicky?)

I think the root problem is that crime isn’t its own independent phenomenon - it’s a symptom of other social problems. So the basic approach of “punish criminals after the fact” is fundamentally flawed, because it has that trade-off you talk about - short-term crime prevention, long-term risk of recidivism. I don’t…

*continues to eat chocolate-coated shrimp*

“Trump snitching on Trump Junior” is actually how a lot of big racketeering type prosecutions work. Whitey Bulger or Joseph Massino, for instance. Charitably, you could say that flipping the leader of the group lets you totally destroy its effectiveness by arresting all the people who actually make it function, and…

I don’t think this makes any sense, because it assumes that the criminal justice system as a whole is “in the interest of society as a whole” and that’s not really true. Innocent people are railroaded, guilty people are slapped with disproportionately harsh punishments, and the whole system is built around maintaining…

You say that as a joke, but I legitimately think that’s going to be the ending. They’ve been in the Good Place the entire time, and this has all been an experiment to get humans to help each other improve their morality.  It’s the inverse of Michael’s original torture plan; Shawn is the “Michael” overseeing the whole…

I agree that Eleanor as a character probably should have caught on to that already, but I think it makes a lot more sense in terms of real world viewers.  Having the realization that your received system of ethics might be wrong is big and scary, and I think it makes sense to have the show hold people’s hands a little…

I kind of think the audience was supposed to buy him as actually appealing to women, just because it all happened at the beginning of the show when they were establishing other elements of his character for the first time.

The weird thing is, I’m rewatching The Critic and it’s kind of absurd how true that is within the world of the show. In the first five episodes, three different attractive women throw themselves at him.

I wonder what’s up with those eyeless elves (or maybe trolls?).  They look like Old Man Touchy.  Also, in the Derek/octopus episode, one of them was hiding in his room.

It feels weird to me that the past few episodes have suddenly started placing a heavy yet sort of ham-handed focus on explicit, institutionalized sexism in this world. This one (where the advisors keep telling Bean that women aren’t allowed to do stuff), the one before it (women can’t be in the theater), and the one…