My own position on criminal justice walks a very fine line. I believe strongly in a rehabilitative model, versus punitive. I think every effort should be made to help people who end up in jail develop the skills they need to not end up back there again. I think rape culture, generally, results from people being…

My partner was actually raised that way, most notably when it comes to cooking. There was an ongoing assumption he and his brothers would never have to cook for themselves, so they were never taught even the most basic cooking and meal planning skills. All thee boys ended up getting very sick from the way they ate…

Perhaps it’s something like that. I think it’s often just passivity bred through increasingly emotionally abusive behaviour. I’ve seen lots similar relationships with the gender reversed - a lovely woman, with a boorish man who seems to have no redeeming qualities - and I typically interpret those relationships as…

I’m very curious who is getting the money on the hat sales. Does it go to the campaign, or is this a Trump Inc. enterprise?

I went to grad school with this really self-centered and manipulative woman who got married during the course of the program. How and why her very nice husband put up with her was a frequent topic of conversation in our cohort. She used to regularly offer me unsolicited (and completely crazy) relationship advice which…

Homeschoolers anonymous is a very disturbing/eye-opening website. I was particularly terrified by the revelation that the HSLDA helps parents accused of child abuse relocate to other states with less oversight and more lax regulations.

My friend who went pro, albeit briefly, didn’t start training seriously in ballet until she was 14, I think. But she naturally had exactly the right body, and was a bit of a prodigy. Her classmates who had started at 3 years old, and trained seriously since they were 7 or 8 were pretty unimpressed when she was the…

Nah, this sort of thing is just more evidence to his crazy fans of how much he respects women - because he’s willing to give them a chance in the business world! We’ll just gloss over the fact that he’ll only do that for extraordinarily beautiful women, and then he’ll pit them against one another and create a toxic…

I’m pretty sure Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a billionaire. And hot.

You’re talking to an Anthropologist, here. STEM is good for some people, but my brain doesn’t work that way. But I’m a big fan of literacy!

I think Netflix needs to leave dead TV shows alone, and stop turning them into sad, zombie-shells of themselves.

I just recently watched the first season for the first time since so many people seem to STILL love Gilmore Girls, I figured I must have really missed out on something good. But, no. It was oddly compelling for a little while, but almost everyone on it is horrible. Loralei is cartoonishly self-centered and…

Seriously. Whenever any woman refers to herself as a princess, I judge her parents, because they messed up somewhere along the line.

I know men do ballet and gymnastics, my point was more that there is far more pressure on women to reach elite levels and then retire at much younger ages than men. For example, the US Olympic Gymnastics team this year. Men’s ages: 23, 24 24, 25, and 29. Women’s ages: 16, 19, 19, 20, 22 (and referred to as “grandma”…

I have no idea what Laurie Hernandez’s homeschooling was like. I do worry about fields where the requirement to succeed at a very young age means that kids are training full-time with so little time left over for academics that they’re almost assuredly getting a sub-standard education. It’s particularly troubling that…

Even in cases where there is a public vote, who does and does not get through one round to the next on reality TV shows is heavily manipulated by the producers (and often decided far in advance for reasons that have nothing to do with talent or performance). If Maureen McCormick genuinely was distractingly high…

Reminds me of a time, in grad school, where two super “progressive” guys critiqued the hell of a study comparing trust of law enforcement across different racial groups in South Africa. They said the study was fundamentally flawed because race doesn’t exist. Could not be convinced that while, yes, they are correct…

That was the thing about Chick tracts - I always wondered if he was a brilliant satirist hiding in plain sight, condemning the insane Christian right by imitating them. Those cartoons were so crazy, they were essentially self-parody.

When I lived in Northern Ireland there were a lot of American evangelicals there trying to save the filthy Irish, and I started collecting the insane bible tracts they would give me. I probably still have a pile somewhere. Then my friend ordered me the complete Jack Chick collection. Like a box of every one of them.…

Excellent - thank you