Basic design principles include fail-safe. If all your active systems fail, the point is that they are designed to fail into a safe position. In the event that the power, and the backups, and the backups to the backups fail, the appropriate result should be completely inert. If you build a factory in a place where the…

It gets a weird synergy from his role in The Wire.

Google “Draco in leather pants”

I will third (forth?) Iain Banks’ Culture novels; probably the best all-around sci-fi series there is, and you can read them in basically any order, though “Player of Games” is the most straightforward intro.

You misremember. Theon’s junk was sent home in a box. Ramsay taunts him with a pork sausage.

A billion sexy selfies and intimate partner pics say otherwise.

The “cartoon cat people” objection makes about as much sense as dismissing the Handmaid’s Take for being chock full of flying nuns. A story is a story, regardless of genre or trappings, and a character can be well or crummily drawn within that story. Drawing attention to the genre as a way of dismissing a particular…

The real blow is that the prevailing legal wisdom is this shouldn’t be possible at all under the Antiquities Act; the law allows establishing parks but says nothing about removing or shrinking them. If they are allowed to have this test balloon of a proposal sail through, it opens the doors to more aggressive attacks…

Or Jeyne Poole. There are a lot of disposable Jeynes in Westeros.

Really the only thing shocking about it was how few (named) casualties there were. I fully expected five or six of the seven to bite it.

Wight polar bear only went down when Jorah shivved it in the brainstem with a dragon glass dagger.

My brother got into football via wanting to learn how to win against his buddies at Madden. /anecdote

How so? Asserting that morality is independent of prevailing sentiment is certainly a position that occurs in religious moral thought, but is certainly not exclusive to them.

Eh, close. Classical liberalism bears most resemblance to modern libertarianism, which is on the right but not particularly conservative. Modern conservatives, for their part, have absorbed some classical liberal DNA but still the dominant strand is the Burke/Strauss line of thought, which developed independently of…

The thread is two-and-a-half thousand posts deep. At that point, bringing up something more thinly related isn't whataboutery, but merely a recognition that the main conversation is played out.

He brings the big hammer. Don't make fun of the big hammer.

I'm sure they exist. I was reacting to the implication that they were "many" and that paranoia over faux feminism is really called for. Sincere male feminism is far more common than feminism as a predatory disguise.

Most of the gang's weapons were dragon glass. Hard to see and they didn't make an expository fuss over it, but everyone not wielding flaming swords, valyrian steel or a big effing hammer was using d-glass. Most obvious was Jorah's dual dagger setup, but also Tormund's axe.

People have never been big on forgiveness or redemption; entire religions with literally billions of members are utterly obsessed with those two concepts and yet the world certainly does not possess a surfeit of either one (one might be given to wonder if this is despite said religions or partially because of them;…

Ah. Yeah, folks who are convinced that their ideas just plain make them smarter than everyone else who have different ideas are indeed quite annoying.