The Catholic Church reminds me a lot of when I used to play Magic: The Gathering in high school: the rules look more or less OK at first glance but the more you get into them they’re so weird and byzantine and open to conflicting interpretation as to be essentially meaningless.

So this entire exchange is based on the fact that you’re a prescriptivist? How pointless. Become a descriptivist; it’s so much better.

Yeah they’re for September :D

Jewish is both. There are ethnic Jews and religious Jews.

I am both jealous that you live close enough to the theater that entering the lottery is reasonable and not jealous because I have tickets. Good luck.

This is getting tiresome. Surely you can see the obstacles to conducting a direct poll of everyone in society. We are never going to get accurate statistics on how people use “Muslim” in common speech; we can only look at examples.

See what I mean? There are several double-castings and they give some fun subtext to the show. For example in the song “Alexander Hamilton” there’s the part where different characters are describing their relation to Hamilton: “We fought with him” is sung by Lafayette/Jefferson and Mulligan/Madison so it’s both “we…

It is possible for someone to agree with what you do without agreeing with the way you do it. Take your example of a woman calling you “fat ass”. If a woman called one of my friends “fat ass” and he responded by calling her a bitch I would have two simultaneous thoughts on the matter: that the woman’s behavior was…

I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to sort words into acceptable and unacceptable. I’m simply telling you that people are going to think you’re a misogynist if you keep saying “bitch”. Those people may be wrong in thinking it but that doesn’t change the fact. You may not care that people think it but that also…

A tailor spying on the British government! Okieriete Onaodowan is really great; it took me a long time to realize that he’s Mulligan and Madison since he’s so different in those roles.

It’s from “My Shot” specifically the line “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom, like it or not”.

We seem to agree that racial categories are determined exclusively by societal standards. We know that racial categories can and do change: look at how Irish and Italian immigrants were initially excluded from the “white” racial category. That means that relying on historical definitions when defining racial…

I’m not sure how to make this clear to you but I’ll keep trying: no one is trying to get you to stop saying “bitch”. You can use whatever terms you want to insult anyone you want. But every single word has connotations outside of their direct meaning and those connotations impact how you are viewed when you use…

Listen to what you’re saying: when a woman behaves in a way you dislike, you want to insult her in a way that is specific to the fact that she is a woman. In your example, had a man called you “fat ass” you wouldn’t call him a bitch because, again, you not only want to insult the woman, you want to specifically bring…

Just because some people use it short hand for a race doesn’t make it a race.

Race is a culturally-defined system of dividing people into groups based on perceived characteristics; it’s not some biological reality. These racial categories are then used as shorthand for sets of percieved characteristics. Yes, you could convert to Islam and become a Muslim but, depending on other things about…

I think “douchebag” is a great feminist insult; after all, a douchebag is a harmful, unnecessary, useless thing that thrives on shaming vagina-havers for simply having vaginas.

I’m not suggesting you stop saying “bitch” (you seem rather attached to it, after all). Rather I am trying to get you, and really everyone, to think more about the words they use and why. You say you only call ignorant women “bitches” but why only ignorant women and not ignorant men? Why is “bitch” determined by men’s…

“Muslim” is every bit as much a race as “Black”. Anti-Black racists are less opposed to particular skin colors than they are to what they view as “Black traits”. Similarly, the people who express anti-Muslim racism are against what they view as “Muslim traits” rather than the practice of Islam itself.

While I agree that “bitch” behavior and “asshole” behavior are different enough to (perhaps) warrant different words, you can’t honestly think that calling someone a bitch has nothing whatsoever to do with women generally. Think about the ways “bitch” is used to insult someone: either a man acting “unmanly” (stop…