Our rule is you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it and our daughter knows the list of stuff she can have in place of dinner but she’s a really good eater so it’s not really an issue. Kids don’t generally have control over what they’re being served so it’s unfair to make them eat it or go hungry. I generally try…

Eh, the age thing would be discrimination. I’m not against the elderly having a say in society. I’m just against any group or person having the only say that matters.

Okay, so, in a related vein, let me ask you this: I read a letter on Slate’s Care and Feeding where a parent was all upset that their kid followed directions.

Says the douchebag who gets upset over words that define bigotry towards disabled people and infers that autistic people can’t function on their own...

What Rowling has said is shit. Don’t defend this bigot she has more than enough money to do it herself. If someone says awful things they should be held accountable. 

Ah I grew up in a dictionary and encyclopedia house too, and now one of my greatest pet peeves is other adults asking me something they could easily solve themselves (I just had a colleague email me asking for the journal name for an article they had the full name, date and authorship for. I did not respond).

What’s funny is that there’s this commenter running across multiple articles on Rowling who constantly makes the insane argument that because Rowling donated a lot of money to charity that she should be absolved of her bigotry like some sort of secular indulgence...

My parents did the same. But they cooked a lot of gross stuff and I've been a disordered eater/food waster since. So maybe it isn't a black/white issue?

Just FYI, a quote from the thread: “She brought me the can opener and we both stared it.  I realized I’d never taught her how to use it.  Most cans now have pull-tops.”

Yep, that’s the whole thing.

With all due respect, Rowling is a bigot. She has been told she was in the wrong multiple times. Some of her fans have even politely explain to her that she was wrong. But instead she doubled down. Hell, she literally threatened to sue a children’s news website because they said her comment were harmful to trans…

“I don’t think J.K. Rowling is transphobic,” Izzard says. “I think we need to look at the things she has written about in her blog. Women have been through such hell over history. Trans people have been invisible, too.”

I also think about RBG’s friendship with Scalia...which he just didn’t deserve.  That’s the problem with nice people, they’re nice to people who don’t deserve it, we all should be meaner and hold the baddies accountable.

When I was about eleven, my mother announced that henceforth she would no longer do my laundry. I would be responsible for my own clothing.. Bit of a problem, though. She gave me no instructions and oh yeah...the building we lived in at the time didn’t have a fucking laundry room. The laundromat was about fours blocks…

It feels like sometimes folks from marginalized groups who attain a crazy amount of success - enough so that they’re essentially inoculated to hardships by money, power, fame, etc - and are able to take a far more forgiving stance on things, especially when it comes to friends. I’m thinking similarly of Ellen paling…

The college libertarian dude who was all about bootstrapping (yet saved up his laundry for his mother) grew up to be some poor kid’s dad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Part of what makes the JKR thing so heartbreaking is the legitimate good she’s done in the world. The legitimately important activism she has done and causes she has supported. All the money she’s donated to good causes. At one point she had given away so much money she came…

My mom bought me a really nice kid’s dictionary when I was a kid. One time, I was reading some version of the Pied Piper, I came across the the word “plague,” which I had never seen before, and I asked her what it meant, and she pointed me to the very nice dictionary she had brought me, and told me to look it up…

When my 10 year old does not know how to do something he never done before, I teach him. How novel is that? Those six hours wasted could have been a good time spent your kid, not seen them frustrated trying to open a can of beans.

This dude sounds like a Complete Asshole. Assuming his daughter is under the age of 12 and literally can’t just walk into the kitchen and fix themselves a sandwich this is basically child abuse.