Here's the thing: I have all the sympathy in the world for people dealing with being socially awkward. Really. I went into studying human communication partly because so much of it always baffled me, and it left me feeling scared and alone for most of my childhood (things got a lot better by high school - thank god…

Amen. Hell, I was a hardcore nerd in high school during the same time period as you, but in Nebraska... and it wasn't bad at all.

This is one of the best summaries I've read of the "fuck you, ladies and minorities, YOU'RE all the ones with the privilege!" mentality that keeps popping up in this shitstorm.

This was actually a key point one of my mentor's made at a meeting one time when discussing the problem of the double-shift for women academics. She said that while it's absolutely the case that men on average need to pick up a much larger share of household work, that that won't happen until more women can learn to…

Don't forget their important secondary audience: sullen non-liberals who inexplicably spend all of their time reading liberal blogs and berating their readership in the comments section.

A number of friends and I, having recently moved from Iowa and Minnesota to New England, have made it our duty to introduce Hot Dish to the people of this strange and exotic land. We've already made several dozen converts.

Utterly horrifying.

That would be the latter.

If women in general started shouting, "Federal marshall, STOP!" whenever getting randomly groped, would that be a crime (impersonating an officer)?

Well, it works for some people.

Oh yes, I'm white. And trust me, I know that plays no small role in my statement - I teach classes on hate speech, critical race theory, etc.

Party in Mark's nose - everybody's invited!

"Danger Zone."

To be fair, I'd much rather live in the US's current sham democracy than in Russia's.

Agreed.

Exactly - this is hyper-controlling in any relationship structure.

Gaaahhhh... I've been practicing ethical non-monogamy for over a decade now, and this is exactly the kind of thing that sends up massive warning flags whenever I encounter it. It almost always happens when a previously monogamous couple decides to open their relationship, but one partner is either not happy about the…

I was thinking for a bit that maybe some kind of threshold system could be put into place, where if you get, say, a minimum of 50 or 100 stars on a given comment, you automatically get bumped to "followed" by the site you posted to.

Heh.. when I teach public speaking, I have a bit where I say, "There's one thing Americans have a particularly hard time dealing with when communicating with each other."