This circles back to the issue of intended vs. received meaning. On the one hand, I’m willing to take you at your word that you have no quarrel with discussion or interpretation. On the other hand, statements like (emphasis added) “You are free to continue your (pointless) discussion based on the (false)…

That’s the rookie mistake. The correct method is a movie and then dinner. You get the initial awkwardness out of the way before the movie starts then have a built-in conversation starter over dinner.

I ruined going to the movies alone for myself in high school: we had an extra credit option to go see Hotel Rwanda and I couldn’t convince anyone to go with me. So I just spent the whole run time in a corner of the theater crying by myself and that is now what I associate with going to the movies alone.

I went to see a movie the other day (Into the Spider-verse; highly recommend) with a large group of friends. We bought out almost an entire row of the theater but there was one poor interloper soul who got a single seat IN THE MIDDLE OF US. I cannot imagine he would knowingly choose that, given the option.

There are several aspects of a text: the literal text on the page, the author’s intended meaning, and the reader’s received meaning. Certainly the author is the authority on their intended meaning. My position is not that the intended meaning is less valid than the received meaning; simply that the intended and the…

Like one of the Hindu goddesses with 1,000 arms Rolodex bitch-slapping the ‘cists.

Yes, cows are ugly and stupid and if we stopped eating them there wouldn’t be so fucking many of them.

Ye gods, why would you waste mental bandwidth on caring about what someone else calls their food?

It’s not blood. Neither is the stuff in a meat burger.

If it makes you feel better, it’s not blood: it’s heme.

There are only 4 takes on the internet:

I suspect this is not a fruitful avenue of discussion but let’s continue anyway.

Again, allowing this woman to use the appropriate restroom didn’t lead to the violence against her unless you assume that disallowing her to use the appropriate restroom—thereby forcing her to use the men’s bathroom—would be safer.

It only “proves their point” if you assume that transwomen are safer in men’s bathrooms.

I’m in the same boat and I’m so unhappy about it. The only way to get anything close to a conclusion to the story is to trust Benioff and Weiss? Ugh.

Or just be baselessly accused of stealing a backpack...

Rowling owns the legal rights to all things Harry Potter. That’s quite a far cry from accepting her as unassailable authority on Harry Potter lore as it exists in the public consciousness.

While you’re correct about the acronym, I try to avoid pointing it out because people use that tenuous connection to denounce actual socialist policies as in “we can’t have Medicaid-for-all! That would be socialist and the Nazis were socialist!”

My dad went to college with a guy who was Firstname Lastname XXIII.