@avclub-d019eb089e65903455cc52308f00b997:disqus I want the redacted.

My favorite was God Emperor of Dune, I think. Either that or Dune Messiah.

Could you really watch all of How I Met Your Mother in three days? Wow. I watched all of it (except the then-airing season 8) when I had pneumonia last November and it took a lot longer than that. But I guess I did, like, sleep and go to the doctor and stuff during that time too.

@avclub-e57f718840a576abbb40a7d046c4e3b0:disqus I think that's a nice quality, actually. That's what I think is so great about literature - the insights we can get into the shared human experience, even in a fictional, exploratory context, including its emotional reaches, so we can access so much more than just what…

Yeah, she was kind of a big thing in those circles I guess. I used to be fairly into Harry Potter so I knew who she was.

This reminds me of the debate about the Girls porn. I think that it's fair if the author isn't very happy about the characters who she developed being used in other people's artwork, but as long as there's no money involved, I don't think there's real grounds.

@avclub-98ee3569ee1cc83f32587edbfb0b857a:disqus No, I do understand that you weren't comparing Israel to the Nazis (though I realize I didn't express that clearly) but I still didn't think it was relevant to bring in, because telling military occupiers to "go back where you came from" just doesn't make sense. The…

I thought Brad Strickland's versions of John Bellairs novels were decent. Obviously not as good as the original works, but I at least enjoyed reading them.

@avclub-98ee3569ee1cc83f32587edbfb0b857a:disqus Well, two people expressing different points of view both of which I think are interesting seems to me like a "discussion," even if your points are not as neutrally expressed as you would find ideal.

@avclub-98ee3569ee1cc83f32587edbfb0b857a:disqus I believe that @avclub-da518aecddbf5c94588f53562012c452:disqus was referring to his comments on giving Helen Thomas the "benefit of the doubt" in the thread immediately above this one.

Statistics are fun, watching baseball is fun, and baseball is an excuse for a ton of statistics. It makes perfect sense to me.

I have two relevant stories. The story of my recent humiliating experience with my terrible doll phobia: http://www.avclub.com/artic…

@avclub-e57f718840a576abbb40a7d046c4e3b0:disqus OK, that's a good point. I wasn't really thinking about subgroups of people who have minority religions in larger states. I was kind of thinking about the distinctions between peoples in the former Yugoslavia. They see themselves as different ethnicities, and I would…

You know, there's an art project/actual political movement (to my mind it kind of borders the two) about the idea of Jewish young people reclaiming Poland as the promised land of their heritage, the "Jewish Renaissance Movement": http://www.artnews.com/2013…

@avclub-da518aecddbf5c94588f53562012c452:disqus I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. To me, the situation is more that it's a word that legitimately means quite different things to different people (as evidenced by all this discussion), and I think is relatively unique in that dimension.

@avclub-62ae6d9e1a24836a391716549223464f:disqus Yeah, that's part of the problem but not all of it I think. It has a (to the best of my knowledge) entirely unique status as a group identifier. I can't think of another group where ethnicity and religion are so confusingly entangled but would welcome someone presenting…

@avclub-011d0b4fe6835bb3d37ef4e0ea713de6:disqus I really waffle on how I feel about "Jew." I feel averse to it but so many Jewish people say it that I can't actually find it offensive. There's also the joke about being just ethnically Jewish, so you're "Jew-ish."

I agree with @spinycreature:disqus that in modern parlance, I see the pejorative sense of "Zionist" used to mean "blindly supporting political interests of Israel in a chauvinist way."

@avclub-e57f718840a576abbb40a7d046c4e3b0:disqus No need to try to make sense of the idea that being against Zionism is anti-Semitic.

I'm not sure I've heard anyone use the term non-pejoratively in its contemporary (as opposed to historical) context. I actually thought that @avclub-21a8615938a206d4311a58a53ad8890e:disqus was using it in the pejorative sense, describing Helen Thomas speaking against what she perceived as Zionism.