I was told by a therapist friend when you tell this kind of client to act better they simply stop coming

Yeah, I do. From what I've read of it it seems contained/modularized pretty well

They really did call themselves the Sad Puppies, what an era of history

Discussion of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded's endorsement of young ladies having sex with socially sanctioned partners at the appropriate time does remind me of one over my favorite bits of Starship Troopers: that state approval dominates Rico's dating life.

... implicitly agree with conservative premises when we engage on these or other issues. Which is, you know, bad! Don't give up the premises, full court press all the way!

Speaking of nuance, it's difficult to talk about pieces of conservative thought DNA that have gotten into how progressives and liberals talk about fiction but this book does a really good job. It's not that they are the same in magnitude or negative impact - it's that we sometimes...

There's a thread through the intro about how people think they are immune to fiction's possible propagandistic qualities but OTHER people aren't that reminds me of studies that show people think everybody else is much more impacted by advertisements than they are.

Also that "apolitical" really means a certain level of status quo realism that doesn't challenge norms, which is nuance I think many folks who say "all art is political" still miss. They are fighting the wrong battle because they've misunderstood what the other side means by "apolitical art."

I'm stamping my feet and cheering at the argument that "art for art's sake" doesn't mean apolitical art, it means treating the whole spectrum of art seriously

I think Ebert's own hobby horse of film as a medium created empathy pushed me away from the idea. I've seen plenty of folks without empathy watch movies and simply not engage with the idea that the filmmakers have forced them to inhabit another viewpoint. They didn't climb to the outer circles

Very into the discussion of sophisticated stories as vegetables and YA, comics, pulp, etc as junk food, because "eat your vegetables" is an oversimplification for kids and the real advice is "consume a variety of things both within and between food groups." Junk food metaphor fails on its own terms.