I know this comment was a long time ago, but I don't think they did tell Paige not to get close to Matthew. They told her she should be exactly as close to Matthew as she wanted to be but not out of anything to do with her parents. They asked if she wanted to date him and said if she did she could do that. So Philip…

And Key and Peele. Basically all sketch comedy troupes, probably.

Yes, and cross-dressing is always part of the show when you're doing sketch comedy with a limited number of performers. The point is the specific character, not that a man is wearing a dress. I think they just don't get sketch comedy.

I didn't think they were really saying Clinton was detestable in their version. She was too much of a turd sandwich to be able to take what he was handing her, but Garrison's supporters clearly weren't being motivated by hating her-they were motivated by loving him. It was his own words about being incompetent that…

Yeah, they told him but I could see Cartman needing an actual girl to confirm it.

But as I remember that ep (and it has been a while), Stan believed what the kid's family said about the reality of the world because why would he think they were lying? Then, like a rational person (and like a child who is taking things at face value), he looked into the claims and saw they were ridiculous. When he…

For me while Kim Darby did a fine job I much prefer Hailiee Steinfeld just being 14 years old to Darby being like 21 and having to try to act young. The second version seems far more true to the character to me.

Also I know I wound up feeling like everyone was just too nuts and their motivations too uniformly perverse after a while.

That's my go-to example too. Even the language cut down is better. There's so much slang in the book but the actors delivering the pared down version is just crackling.

Or just don't follow the football team under your new, anonymous Twitter, and you won't get their Tweets in your feed. I agreed with that part.

Right—and the internet also gives you the option of just being someone else and going wherever you want. They can't see you unless you tell them it's you. But there's also going to be situations where Twitter in general would prefer to have the person as themselves and the football team to STFU.

I wouldn't put up pictures of my kids up that way either—I'm with you there. Just saying that once the picture's up (or in the newspaper or on TV or whatever) a stranger telling you your kid's ugly is probably going to get a reaction—even from somebody who knows they shouldn't pay attention to it.

The lonely kid is sad by definition, but why would a book be a better alternative than finding other people to talk to so they're not as lonely? The internet is basically a high-tech version of a pen pal—iow, another person you're interacting with. They're not interaction with a keyboard, they're using the keyboard to…

Okay, but the originally discussion was whether something was causing harm. I think people telling Leslie Jones she's a N**** gorilla, or telling some other woman she ought to be raped and killed is objectively causing harm—that's the whole intention is to cause distress and fear in the person they're saying it to.…

None that I can see!

I guess it depends what level we're calling something harm. It's good advice not to obsess over mean remarks from strangers even if you can't control your emotional reaction to them in the moment, but the whole point of trolling is to get negative emotional reactions, even if it's only for that moment. (And some…

Or another great example is any hereditary condition that isn't a good thing—might even be very disabling or fatal—but doesn't keep a person from having children. Like a fatal condition that kicks in in adulthood/middle age—that's not going to be selected out because it appears after the person's had children.

I took it that he really wanted to tell someone about what he was doing and Ike was a safe target because he could brag about it and justify it and talk about how fun it was without Ike picking up on it. And that he was probably supposed to be talking to him about not behaving badly on the Internet, which he feels he…

Me too! :-)

But a tool you're using to communicate is, as you say, just a tool YOU are using to communicate. I'm not talking about somebody who has an Instagram and sees it as part of their personal brand and lives or dies on how many likes they get. I just mean that when you are using a tool to communicate and someone insults…