People's minds actually do get changed, though. (Dawkins, for instance, keeps a tally of the number of people who write to him to let him know that "The God Delusion" reasoned them out of faith, and it's now somewhere in the thousands.) Oftentimes, maybe people who are already atheists are "in the atheist closet",…

I don't think the position that "the creator of the universe is personally invested in my happiness, and they'll actually bend the laws of physics for me if I really, really want them to" could possibly, by any intelligent person, be construed as equally arrogant as the position "um, that's probably not true, dude."

But for me, believing in some sort of intelligence or guiding influence other than our own is comforting.

Not everybody in the Mafia shot people or stole things.

"Don't be a dick" is a fairly universal "moral floor" for this generation.

Yeah, but actual scientists laugh at "philosophers of science." Seriously - I once explained Karl Popper to a couple of research scientists and they literally laughed.

Honestly, "philosophy of science" is just a pretty transparent attempt for philosophers to take credit for science, by pretending that we'd be lost in…

Because it's like saying "sure, I'm in the Mafia, but it's not like I shoot people or sell drugs; for me, it's just about good pasta and nice suits and, every so often, getting paid cash money."

What sites are still vulnerable to "simple" SQL injections? Almost nobody is writing their own object-relational mappers anymore, and all the major frameworks escape user-entered text. That's assuming you've built on top of a SQL database, but increasingly, NoSQL backends are the norm. Good luck SQL-injecting a…

But it's not my parent's body, though; it's mine. Children eventually become adults (if they put in the time.) Parents advocate on behalf of the child's interests; but they don't have the right to supercede a child's ownership of their own body. Only when they're acting in the best interests of the child are they…

Why on Earth does age matter? Children, even infants, aren't the property of their parents; even their ability to "consent on behalf" of their children is subject only to them doing so in the child's best interest; no parent can "consent" to their infant getting a tattoo, for instance, or "consent" to their child…

You don't want it, either for yourself or your son, that's your decision.

You know what gets to me? When people insist that "FGM isn't comparable to male circumcision" well in advance of anyone actually having made that comparison.

"Skin barrier"? You've seen one, right? You do know that there's a hole in one end, right?

Actually, you're not. The only indication of that are the African studies, which compared uncircumcised men to freshly-circumcised adult men, and didn't control for the period of time that the circumcised men spent not having sex, because they were healing from the circumcision.

Right, the Africa studies - which compare uncircumcised adult men to men who had circumcisions as an adult, and <I>don't control for the up-to-6-month period</I> that the circumcised men, healing from a major surgery to the penis, opted not to have intercourse.

You've never spent half that on a haircut because you're a guy, so you get charged about 50% the women's rate. Be a woman, and try to "invest" in a decent haircut you can make last for months, and you'll easily spend 4x what they charge someone like you at the Supercuts. More, if you're a minority.

And you don't think one of your kids could be being manipulative and shitty because you've basically programmed victimhood into the other? Did you just grow up as an only child, then?

That etymology is ridiculous. I'm pretty sure Aristotle didn't coin the phrase "deaf and dumb" since, you know, he lived at least 400 years before the earliest precursors of English and spoke only Greek.

So it's impossible to be accidentally offended? To interpret malice where none was intended, or even present?

But the problem here is - the joke did work. It was funny and brilliant.