Please re-read what I wrote. Vancouver was listed as the exception. And yes, Vancouver is lovely and I’d move there in a heartbeat if I could.

Think of somewhere in the continental USA that you consider really cold. Really cold. Anywhere.

The shelters are not made by Ikea, but by BetterShelters.org.

The donation cost is listed as 14700 Krona. That’s about US$1686. The economics are not going to work as a buy-1-donate-1 program, I think.

I did not realize that we were having a scholarly discussion rather than an exchange on a jezebel comment thread.

I did not equate the Arabic world with Islam, so I see no need to identify specific religious affiliations with particular tasks. Cultural preservation requires more than just translation. The point to make is nothing more (or less) than that our current scientific and medical understanding of the world owes a great…

Wow, I guess we can all be grateful that we can continue to use paper and gunpowder with nary a thought to our behaviour. Nothing like “culture” from a civilization that we never colonized or dominated. Praise be to China (and our wise ancestors who never managed to take it over - I mean, imagine if they had! Blowing…

Not only that. The Arabic world acted as the repository for the mathematics science of the Romans (and before them, the Greeks) as the Roman empire collapsed. They not only preserved it, but continued to develop it: many important ideas in mathematics, medicine and astronomy (to name just 3 areas) date back to…

One definition of “afford to have children” implies “able to live with only the equivalent of 1 full time working parent”. I’m not speaking for or against that definition, merely pointing it out.

Jia emphasized:

The issue isn’t whether accidents happen but more who can be held liable if they do. There is a secondary question of whether the actual properties are safe, but liability is one way to improve the real world answer to that question as well.

Oh, it gets better. Fox news has a panel to decide on whether it’s OK for you to wear leggings:

Have you seriously heard any gun control advocates say we should just ignore the 2nd amendment? The ones I’ve heard and support all (reluctantly) acknowledge the 2nd amendment, and attempt to figure what can be done given its existence.

Maybe it is just me (as the sole cook in my family), but given the likelihood of multiple people using a kitchen, isn’t the only sane choice a height that is based on the average human height, rather than average male or average female height?

All fair and good points. I think you’re simplifying some of the concepts of ethnicity a bit, and the way that white culture sees and defines “non-white”, but I get the point, and its a good one.

Absolutely. But the IMdB listing in the original post has 15 names. Given a realistic percentage from that era, how many do you think would end up (statistically) being non-white?

Congratulations. You’ve established that our society is composed of a variety of different voices, some of whom “flip out” over the clearly ridiculous casting in Exodus, some of whom “flip out” over the casting in various other films. Lots of people flip out over all kinds of things - this matters much less than what…

I’m not disagreeing that (a) there ought to be more diverse casting in our culture; (b) that there are numerous variations on the basics of this particular Coen brothers’ movie that would have been entertaining and would have aided in (a); (c) that there are too many gatekeepers that limit the diversity of stories…

I am not clear that a story set somewhere in western Europe in either the 16th or 13th century has much connection to racism or slavery. Although slavery was not unknown in western Europe at that time, it seems not to have been common at all (some have suggested that the rise of serfdom was partly responsible for…

And if they actually wanted to be realistic, what would that imply?